PART VI (4) THE GIZA INVITATION , EGYPT 1

Part VI

The Giza Invitation
Egypt 1


Chapter 33 - Cardinal Points
Giza, Egypt, 16 March 1993, 3:30 a.m.

We walked through the deserted lobby of our hotel and stepped into the white Fiat waiting for us in the driveway outside. It was driven by a lean, nervous Egyptian named Ali whose job it was to get us past the guards at the Great Pyramid and away again before sunrise. He was nervous because if things went wrong Santha and I would be deported from Egypt and he would go to jail for six months.

Of course, things were not supposed to go wrong. That was why Ali was with us. The day before we’d paid him 150 US dollars which he had changed into Egyptian pounds and spread among the guards concerned. They, in return, had agreed to turn a blind eye to our presence during the next couple of hours.

We drove to within half a mile of the Pyramid, then walked the rest of the way—around the side of the steep embankment that looms above the village of Nazlet-el-Samaan and leads to the monument’s north face. None of us said very much as we trudged through the soft sand just out of range of the security lights. We felt excited and apprehensive at the same time. Ali was by no means certain that his bribes were going to work.

For a while we stood still in the shadows, gazing at the monstrous bulk of the Pyramid reaching into the darkness above us and blotting out the southern stars. Then a patrol of three men armed with shotguns and wrapped in blankets against the night chill came into view at the northeastern corner, about fifty yards away, where they stopped to share a cigarette. Indicating that we should stay put, Ali stepped forward into the light and walked over to the guards. He talked to them for several minutes, apparently arguing heatedly. Finally he beckoned to us, indicating that we should join him.

‘There’s a problem,’ he explained. ‘One of them, the captain here, [he indicated a short, unshaven, disgruntled looking fellow] is insisting that we pay an extra thirty dollars otherwise the deal is off. What do you want to do?’

I fished around in my wallet, counted out thirty dollars and handed the bills to Ali. He folded them and passed them to the captain. With an air of aggrieved dignity, the captain stuffed the money into his shirt pocket, and, finally, we all shook hands.

‘OK,’ said Ali, ‘let’s go.’


Inexplicable precision
As the guards continued their patrol in a westerly direction along the northern face of the Great Pyramid, we made our way around the northeastern corner and along the base of the eastern face.

I had long ago fallen into the habit of orienting myself according to the monument’s sides. The northern face was aligned, almost perfectly, to true north, the eastern face almost perfectly to true east, the southern to true south, and the western face to true west. The average error was only around three minutes of arc (down to less than two minutes on the southern face)1—incredible accuracy for any building in any epoch, and an inexplicable, almost supernatural feat here in Egypt 4500 years ago when the Great Pyramid was supposed to have been built.



1 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 208

An error of three arc minutes represents an infinitesimal deviation from true of less than 0.015 per cent. In the opinion of structural engineers, with whom I had discussed the Great Pyramid, the need for such precision was impossible to understand.



From their point of view as practical builders, the expense, difficulty and time spent achieving it would not have been justified by the apparent results: even if the base of the monument had been as much as two or three degrees out of true (an error of say 1 per cent) the difference to the naked eye would still have been too small to be noticeable. On the other hand the difference in the magnitude of the tasks required (to achieve accuracy within three minutes as opposed to three degrees) would have been immense.

Overview of Giza from the north looking south, with the Great Pyramid in the foreground.


Obviously, therefore, the ancient master-builders who had raised the Pyramid at the very dawn of human civilization must have had powerful motives for wanting to get the alignments with the cardinal directions just right. Moreover, since they had achieved their objective with uncanny exactness they must have been highly skilled, knowledgeable and competent people with access to excellent surveying and setting-out equipment.



This impression was confirmed by many of the monument’s other characteristics. For example, its sides at the base were all almost exactly the same length, demonstrating a margin of error far smaller than modern architects would be required to achieve today in the construction of, say, an average-size office block. This was no office block, however. It was the Great Pyramid of Egypt, one of the largest structures ever built by man and one of the oldest. Its north side was 755 feet 4.9818 inches in length; its west side was 755 feet 9.1551 inches in length; its east side was 755 feet 10.4937 inches; its south side 756 feet 0.9739 inches.2



2 J. H. Cole, Survey of Egypt, paper no. 39: ‘The Determination of the Exact Size and Orientation of the Great Pyramid of Giza’, Cairo, 1925.



This meant that there was a difference of less than 8 inches between its shortest and longest sides: an error amounting to a tiny fraction of 1 per cent on an average side length of over 9063 inches.

Once again, I knew from an engineering perspective that the bare figures did not do justice to the enormous care and skill required to achieve them. I knew, too, that scholars had not yet come up with a convincing explanation of exactly how the Pyramid builders had adhered consistently to such high standards of precision.3



3 The conventional explanations, as given in The Pyramids of Egypt, for example, are entirely unsatisfactory, as Edwards himself admits; see pp. 85-7, 206-41.

What really interested me, however, was the even bigger question-mark over another issue:

Why had they imposed such exacting standards on themselves?

If they had permitted a margin of error of 1-2 per cent— instead of less than one-tenth of 1 per cent—they could have simplified their tasks with no apparent loss of quality.

Why hadn’t they done so?

Why had they insisted on making everything so difficult?

Why, in short, in a supposedly ‘primitive’ stone monument built more than 4500 years ago were we seeing this strange, obsessional adherence to machine-age standards of precision?


Black hole in history
Our plan was to climb the Great Pyramid—something that had been strictly illegal since 1983 when the messy falls of several foolhardy tourists had forced the government of Egypt to impose a ban. I realized that we were being foolhardy too (particularly in attempting the climb at night) and I didn’t feel good about breaking what was basically a sensible law. By this stage, however, my intense interest in the Pyramid, and my desire to learn everything I could about it, had over-ridden my common sense.

Now, after parting company with the guard patrol at the north-eastern corner of the monument, we continued to make our way surreptitiously along the eastern face towards the south-eastern corner.

There were dense shadows among the twisted and broken paving stones that separated the Great Pyramid from the three much smaller ‘subsidiary’ pyramids lying immediately to its east. There were also three deep and narrow rock-cut pits which resembled giant graves. These had been found empty by the archaeologists who had excavated them, but were shaped as though they had been intended to enclose the hulls of high-prowed, streamlined boats.

Roughly halfway along the Pyramid’s eastern face we encountered another patrol. This time it consisted of two guards, one of whom must have been eighty years old. His companion, a teenager with pustulant acne, informed us that the money Ali had paid was insufficient and that fifty more Egyptian pounds would be required if we were to proceed. I already had the notes in my hand and gave them to the lad without delay. I was past caring how much this was costing; I just wanted to make the climb and get down and away before dawn without being arrested.

We walked on, reaching the south-eastern corner at a little after 4:15 a.m.

Very few modern buildings, even the houses we live in, have corners that consist of perfect ninety degree right angles; it is common for them to be a degree or more out of true. It doesn’t make any difference structurally and nobody notices such minute errors. In the case of the Great Pyramid, however, I knew that the ancient master-builders had found a way to narrow the margin of error to almost nothing.



Thus, while falling short of the perfect ninety degrees, the south-eastern corner achieved an impressive 89° 56’ 27”. The north-eastern corner measured 90° 3’ 2”; the southwestern 90° 0’ 33”, and the north-western was just two seconds of a degree out of true at 89° 59’ 58”.4



4 Ibid., p. 87.

This was, of course, extraordinary. And like almost everything else about the Great Pyramid it was also extremely difficult to explain. Such accurate building techniques—as accurate as the best we have today— could have evolved only after thousands of years of development and experimentation. Yet there was no evidence that any process of this kind had ever taken place in Egypt. The Great Pyramid and its neighbors at Giza had emerged out of a black hole in architectural history so deep and so wide that neither its bottom nor its far side had ever been identified.



Ships in the desert
Guided by the increasingly perspiring Ali, who had not yet explained why it was necessary for us to circumnavigate the Pyramid before climbing it, we now began to make our way in a westerly direction along the monument’s southern side. Here there were two further boat-shaped pits, one of which, although still sealed, had been investigated with fibre-optic cameras and was known to contain a high-prowed sea-going vessel more than 100 feet long. The other pit had been excavated in the 1950s. Its contents—an even larger seagoing vessel, a full 141 feet in length5—had been placed in the so-called Boat Museum, an ugly modern structure that gangled on stilts beneath the south face of the Pyramid.

Made of cedarwood, the beautiful ship in the museum was still in perfect condition 4500 years after it had been built. With a displacement of around 40 tons, its design was particularly thought-provoking, incorporating, in the words of one expert,

‘all the sea-going ship’s characteristic properties, with prow and stern soaring upward, higher than in a Viking ship, to ride out the breakers and high seas, not to contend with the little ripples of the Nile.’6

5 See Lionel Casson, Ships and Seafaring in Ancient Times, University of Texas Press, 1994, p. 17; The Ra Expeditions, p. 15.

6 The Ra Expeditions, p. 17.

Another authority felt that the careful and clever design of this strange pyramid boat could potentially have made it ‘a far more seaworthy craft than anything available to Columbus’.7 Moreover, the experts agreed that it had been built to a pattern that could only have been ‘created by shipbuilders from a people with a long, solid tradition of sailing on the open sea.’ 8

Present at the very beginning of Egypt’s 3000-year history, who had those as yet unidentified shipbuilders been? They had not accumulated their ‘long, solid tradition of sailing on the open sea’ while ploughing the fields of the landlocked Nile Valley. So where and when had they developed their maritime skills?

There was yet another puzzle. I knew that the Ancient Egyptians had been very good at making scale models and representations of all manner of things for symbolic purposes.9 I therefore found it hard to understand why they would have gone to the trouble of manufacturing and then burying a boat as big and sophisticated as this if its only function, as the Egyptologists claimed, had been as a token of the spiritual vessel that would carry the soul of the deceased king to heaven.10



That could have been achieved as effectively with a much smaller craft, and only one would have been needed, not several. Logic therefore suggested that these gigantic vessels might have been intended for some other purpose altogether, or had some quite different and still unsuspected symbolic significance ...

We had reached the rough midpoint of the southern face of the Great Pyramid when we at last realized why we were being taken on this long walkabout. The objective was for us to be relieved of moderate sums of money at each of the four cardinal points. The tally thus far was 30 US dollars at the northern face and 50 Egyptian pounds at the eastern face. Now I shelled out a further 50 Egyptian pounds to yet another patrol Ali was supposed to have paid off the day before.

‘Ali,’ I hissed, ‘when are we going to climb the Pyramid?’

‘Right away, Mr. Graham,’ our guide replied. He walked confidently forward, gesturing directly ahead, then added, ‘We shall ascend at the south-west corner ...’

7 Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, pp. 132-3.

8 The Ra Expeditions, p. 16.
9 See, for example, Christine Desroches-Noblecourt, Tutankhamen, Penguin Books, London, 1989, pages 89, 108, 113, 283.

10 A.J. Spencer, The Great Pyramid Fact Sheet, P.J. Publications, 1989.



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Chapter 34 - Mansion of Eternity


Have you ever climbed a pyramid, at night, fearful of arrest, with your nerves in shreds?

It’s a surprisingly difficult thing to do, especially where the Great Pyramid is concerned. Even though its top 31 feet are no longer intact, its presently exposed summit platform still stands more than 450 feet above ground level.1 It consists, moreover, of 203 separate courses of masonry, with the average course height being about two and a quarter feet.2



1 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 8.
2 Peter Lemesurier, The Great Pyramid: Your Personal Guide, Element Books, Shaftesbury, 1987, p. 225.

Averages do not tell you everything, as I discovered soon after we began the climb. The courses turned out to be of unequal depth, some barely reaching knee level while others came up almost to my chest and created formidable obstacles. At the same time the horizontal ledges between each of the steps were very narrow, often only a little wider than my foot, and many of the big limestone blocks, which had looked so solid from below, proved to be crumbling and broken.

Somewhere around 30 courses up Santha and I began to appreciate what we had let ourselves in for. Our muscles were aching and our knees and fingers stiff and bruised—yet we were barely one-seventh of the way to the summit and there were still more than 170 courses to climb. Another worry was the vertiginous drop steadily opening beneath us.



Looking down along the ruptured contours that marked the line of the southwestern corner, I was taken aback to see how far we had already climbed and experienced a momentary, giddying presentiment of how easy it would be for us to fall, head over heels like Jack and Jill, bouncing and jolting over the huge layers of stone, breaking our crowns at the bottom.

Ali had permitted a pause of a few moments for us to catch our breaths, but now he signalled that we should press on and began to climb again. Still using the corner as a guideline, he rapidly disappeared into the darkness above.

Somewhat less confidently, Santha and I followed.



Time and motion
The 35th course of masonry was a hard one to clamber over, being made of particularly massive blocks, much larger than any of the others we had so far encountered (except those at the very base) and estimated to weigh between 10 and 15 tons apiece.3



This contradicted engineering logic and commonsense, both of which called for a progressive decrease in the size and weight of the blocks that had to be transported to the summit as the pyramid rose ever higher. Courses 1-18, which diminished from a height of about 55.5 inches at ground level to just over 23 inches at course 17, did obey this rule.



Then suddenly, at course 19, the block height rose again to almost 36 inches. At the same time the other dimensions of the blocks also increased and their weight grew from the relatively manoeuvrable range of 2-6 tons that was common in the first 18 courses to the more ponderous and cumbersome range of 10-15 tons.4 These, therefore, were really big monoliths that had been carved out of solid limestone and raised more than 100 feet into the air before being placed faultlessly in position.

To have worked effectively the pyramid builders must have had nerves of steel, the agility of mountain goats, the strength of lions and the confidence of trained steeplejacks. With the cold morning wind whipping around my ears and threatening to launch me into flight, I tried to imagine what it must have been like for them, poised dangerously at this (and much higher) altitudes, lifting, manoeuvring and positioning exactly an endless production line of chunky limestone monoliths—the smallest of which weighed as much as two modern family cars.

How long had the pyramid taken to complete? How many men had worked on it? The consensus among Egyptologists was two decades and 100,000 men.5 It was also generally agreed that the construction project had not been a year-round affair but had been confined (through labour force availability) to the annual three-month agricultural lay-off season imposed by the flooding of the Nile.6

As I continued to climb, I reminded myself of the implications of all this. It wasn’t just the tens of thousands of blocks weighing 15 tons or more that the builders would have had to worry about. Year in, year out, the real crises would have been caused by the millions of ‘average-sized’ blocks, weighing say 2.5 tons, that also had to be brought to the working plane. The Pyramid has been reliably estimated to consist of a total of 2.3 million blocks.7



3 Dr. Joseph Davidovits and Margie Morris, The Pyramids: An Enigma Solved, Dorset Press, New York, 1988, pp. 39-40.

4 Ibid., p. 37.

5 John Baines and Jaromir Malek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt, Time-Life Books, Virginia, 1990, p. 160; The Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 229-30.

6 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 229.

7 Ibid., p. 85.



Assuming that the masons worked ten hours a day, 365 days a year, the mathematics indicate that they would have needed to place 31 blocks in position every hour (about one block every two minutes) to complete the Pyramid in twenty years. Assuming that construction work had been confined to the annual three-month lay-off, the problems multiplied: four blocks a minute would have had to be delivered, about 240 every hour.

Such scenarios are, of course, the stuff construction managers’ nightmares are made of. Imagine, for example, the daunting degree of coordination that must have been maintained between the masons and the quarries to ensure the requisite rate of block flow across the production site. Imagine also the havoc if even a single 2.5 ton block had been dropped from, say, the 175th course.

The physical and managerial obstacles seemed staggering on their own, but beyond these was the geometrical challenge represented by the pyramid itself, which had to end up with its apex positioned exactly over the centre of its base. Even the minutest error in the angle of incline of any one of the sides at the base would have led to a substantial misalignment of the edges at the apex. Incredible accuracy, therefore, had to be maintained throughout, at every course, hundreds of feet above the ground, with great stone blocks of killing weight.



Rampant stupidity
How had the job been done?

At the last count there were more than thirty competing and conflicting theories attempting to answer that question. The majority of academic Egyptologists have argued that ramps of one kind or another must have been used. This was the opinion, for example, of Professor I.E.S Edwards, a former keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum who asserted categorically:

‘Only one method of lifting heavy weights was open to the ancient Egyptians, namely by means of ramps composed of brick and earth which sloped upwards from the level of the ground to whatever height was desired.’8

John Baines, professor of Egyptology at Oxford University, agreed with Edwards’s analysis and took it further:

‘As the pyramid grew in height, the length of the ramp and the width of its base were increased in order to maintain a constant gradient (about 1 in 10) and to prevent the ramp from collapsing. Several ramps approaching the pyramid from different sides were probably used.’9

To carry an inclined plane to the top of the Great Pyramid at a gradient of 1:10 would have required a ramp 4800 feet long and more than three times as massive as the Great Pyramid itself (with an estimated volume of 8 million cubic meters as against the Pyramid’s 2.6 million cubic meters).10

8 Ibid., p. 220.
9 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 139.
10 Peter Hodges and Julian Keable, How the Pyramids Were Built, Element Books, Shaftesbury, 1989, p. 123.

Heavy weights could not have been dragged up any gradient steeper than this by any normal means.11 If a lesser gradient had been chosen, the ramp would have had to be even more absurdly and disproportionately massive.

The problem was that mile-long ramps reaching a height of 480 feet could not have been made out of ‘bricks and earth’ as Edwards and other Egyptologists supposed. On the contrary, modern builders and architects had proved that such ramps would have caved in under their own weight if they had consisted of any material less costly and less stable than the limestone ashlars of the Pyramid itself.12

Since this obviously made no sense (besides, where had the 8 million cubic meters of surplus blocks been taken after completion of the work?), other Egyptologists had proposed the use of spiral ramps made of mud brick and attached to the sides of the Pyramid. These would certainly have required less material to build, but they would also have failed to reach the top.13



They would have presented deadly and perhaps insurmountable problems to the teams of men attempting to drag the big blocks of stone around their hairpin corners. And they would have crumbled under constant use. Most problematic of all, such ramps would have cloaked the whole pyramid, thus making it impossible for the architects to check the accuracy of the setting-out during building.14

But the pyramid builders had checked the accuracy of the setting out, and they had got it right, because the apex of the pyramid was poised exactly over the centre of the base, its angles and its corners were true, each block was in the correct place, and each course had been laid down level—in near-perfect symmetry and with near-perfect alignment to the cardinal points.



Then, as though to demonstrate that such tours-de-force of technique were mere trifles, the ancient master-builders had gone on to play some clever mathematical games with the monument’s dimensions, presenting us, for example, as we saw in Chapter Twenty-three, with an accurate use of the transcendental number pi in the ratio of its height to its base perimeter.15 For some reason, too, it had taken their fancy to place the Great Pyramid almost exactly on the 30th parallel at latitude 29° 58’ 51”.



11 Ibid., p. 11.

12 Ibid., p. 13.
13 Ibid., p. 125-6. Failure to reach the top would be because spiral ramps and linked scaffolds overlap and exceed the space available long before arrival at the summit.

14 Ibid., p. 126.
15 See Chapter Twenty-three; The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 219; Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 139.



This, as a former astronomer royal of Scotland once observed, was ‘a sensible defalcation from 30°’, but not necessarily in error:

For if the original designer had wished that men should see with their body, rather than their mental eyes, the pole of the sky from the foot of the Great Pyramid, at an altitude before them of 30°, he would have had to take account of the refraction of the atmosphere; and that would have necessitated the building standing not at 30° but at 29° 58’ 22”.16

16 Piazzi Smyth, The Great Pyramid: Its Secrets and Mysteries Revealed, Bell Publishing Company, New York, 1990, p. 80.



Compared to the true position of 29° 58’ 51”, this was an error of less than half an arc minute, suggesting once again that the surveying and geodetic skills brought to bear here must have been of the highest order.

Feeling somewhat overawed, we climbed on, past the 44th and 45th courses of the hulking and enigmatic structure. At the 40th course an angry voice hailed us in Arabic from the plaza below and we looked down to see a tiny, turbaned man dressed in a billowing kaftan. Despite the range, he had unslung his shotgun and was preparing to take aim at us.



The guardian and the vision
He was, of course, the guardian of the Pyramid’s western face, the patrolman of the fourth cardinal point, and he had not received the extra funds dispensed to his colleagues of the north, east and south faces.

I could tell from Ali’s perspiration that we were in a potentially tricky situation. The guard was ordering us to come down at once so that he could place us under arrest.

‘This, however, could probably be avoided with a further payment,’ Ali explained.

I groaned. ‘Offer him 100 Egyptian pounds.’

‘Too much,’ Ali cautioned, ‘it will make the others resentful. I shall offer him 50.’

More words were exchanged in Arabic. Indeed, over the next few minutes, Ali and the guard managed to have quite a sustained conversation up and down the south-western corner of the Pyramid at 4:40 in the morning. At one point a whistle was blown. Then the guards of the southern face put in a brief appearance and stood in conference with the guard of the western face, who had now also been joined by the two other members of his patrol.

Just when it seemed that Ali had lost whatever argument he was having on our behalf, he smiled and heaved a sigh of relief.

‘You will pay the extra 50 pounds when we have returned to the ground,’ he explained. ‘They’re letting us continue but they say that if any senior officer comes along and sees us they will not be able to help us.’

We struggled upwards in silence for the next ten minutes or so until we had reached the tooth course—roughly the halfway mark and already well over 250 feet above the ground. We gazed over our shoulders to the southwest, where a once-in-a-lifetime vision of staggering beauty and power confronted us. The crescent moon, which hung low in the sky to the south-east, had emerged from behind a scudding cloud bank and projected its ghostly radiance directly at the northern and eastern faces of the neighbouring Second Pyramid, supposedly built by the Fourth Dynasty Pharaoh Khafre (Chephren).



This stunning monument, second only in size and majesty to the Great Pyramid itself (being just a few feet shorter and 48 feet narrower at the base) appeared lit up, as though energized from within, by a pale and unearthly fire. Behind it in the distance, slightly offset among the dark desert shadows, was the smaller Pyramid of Menkaure (Mycerinus), measuring 356 feet along each side and some 215 feet in height.17



17 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 125.

For a moment, against the glittering backdrop of the inky sky, experienced the illusion of being in motion, of standing at the stern of some great ship of the heavens and looking back at two other vessels which seemed to follow in my wake, strung out in battle order behind me.

So where was this convoy going, this squadron of pyramids?

And were the prodigious structures all the work of megalomaniac pharaohs, as the Egyptologists believed?

Or had they been designed by mysterious hands to voyage eternally through time and space towards some as yet unidentified objective?

From this altitude, though the southern sky was partially occluded by the vast bulk of the Pyramid of Khafre, I could see all the western sky as it arched down from the celestial north pole towards the distant rim of the revolving planet. Polaris, the Pole Star, was far to my right, in the constellation of the Little Bear. Low on the horizon, about ten degrees north of west, Regulus, the paw-star of the imperial constellation of Leo, was about to set.



Under Egyptian skies
Just above the 150th course, Ali hissed at us to keep our heads down. A police car had come into view around the north-western corner of the Great Pyramid and was now proceeding along the western flank of the monument with its blue light slowly flashing.



We stayed motionless in the shadows until the car had passed. Then we began to climb again, with a renewed sense of urgency, heading as fast as we could towards the summit, which we now imagined we could see jutting out above the misty predawn haze.

For what seemed like five minutes we climbed without stopping. When I looked up, however, the top of the Pyramid still seemed as far away as ever. We climbed again, panting and sweating, and once again the summit drew back before us like some legendary Welsh peak. Then, just when we’d resigned ourselves to an endless succession of such disappointments, we found ourselves at the top, under a breathtaking canopy of stars, more than 450 feet above the surrounding plateau on the most extraordinary viewing platform in the world.



To our north and east, sprawled out across the wide, sloping valley of the River Nile, lay the city of Cairo, a jumble of skyscrapers and flat traditional roofs separated by the dark defiles of narrow streets and interspersed with the needlepoint minarets of a thousand and one mosques. A film of reflected street-lighting shimmered over the whole scene, closing the eyes of modern Cairenes to the wonder of the stars but at the same time creating the hallucination of a fairyland illuminated in greens and reds and blues and sulphurous yellows.

I felt privileged to witness this strange, electronic mirage from such an incredible vantage point, perched on the summit platform of the last surviving wonder of the ancient world, hovering in the sky over Cairo like Aladdin on his magic carpet.

Not that the 203rd course of the Great Pyramid of Egypt could be described as a carpet! Measuring just under 30 feet on each side (as against the monument’s side length of around 755 feet at the base) it consisted of several hundred waist-high limestone blocks, each of which weighed about five tons. The course was not completely level: a few blocks were missing or broken, and rising towards the southern end there were the substantial remains of about half an additional step of masonry.



Moreover, at the very centre of the platform, someone had arranged for a triangular wooden scaffold to be erected, through the middle of which rose a thick pole, just over 31 feet long, which marked the monument’s original true height of 481.3949 feet.18 Beneath this a scrawl of graffiti had been carved into the limestone by generations of tourists.19



18 Ibid., p. 87.
19 ‘One is irritated by the number of imbeciles’ names written everywhere,’ Gustave Flaubert commented in his Letters From Egypt. ‘On the top of the Great Pyramid there is a certain Buffard, 79 rue St Martin, wallpaper manufacturer, in black letters.’

The complete ascent of the Pyramid had taken us about half an hour and it was now just after 5 a.m., the time of morning worship. Almost in unison, the voices of a thousand and one muezzins rang out from the balconies of the minarets of Cairo, calling the faithful to prayer and reaffirming the greatness, the indivisibility, the mercy and the compassion of God. Behind me, to the south-west, the top 22 courses of Khafre’s Pyramid, still clad with their original facing stones, seemed to float like an iceberg on the ocean of moonlight.

Knowing that we could not stay long in this bewitching place, I sat down and gazed around at the heavens. Over to the west, across limitless desert sands, Regulus had now set beneath the horizon, and the rest of the lion’s body was poised to follow. The constellations of Virgo and Libra were also dropping lower in the sky and, much farther to the north, I could see the Great and Little Bears slowly pacing out their eternal cycle around the celestial pole.

I looked south-east across the Nile Valley and there was the crescent moon still spreading its spectral radiance from the bank of the Milky Way.

Following the course of the celestial river, I looked due south: there, crossing the meridian, was the resplendent constellation of Scorpius dominated by the first-magnitude star Antares—a red supergiant 300 times the diameter of the sun. North-east, above Cairo, sailed Cygnus the swan, his tail feathers marked by Deneb, a blue-white supergiant visible to us across more than 1800 light years of interstellar space. Last but not least, in the northern sky, the dragon Draco coiled sinuously among the circumpolar stars.



Indeed, 4500 years ago, when the Great Pyramid was supposedly being built for the Fourth Dynasty Pharaoh Khufu (Cheops), one of the stars of Draco had stood close to the celestial north pole and had served as the Pole Star. This had been alpha Draconis, also known as Thuban. With the passing of the millennia, however, it had gradually been displaced from its position by the remorseless celestial mill of the earth’s axial precession so that the Pole Star today is Polaris in the Little Bear.20



20 Skyglobe 3.6.

I lay back, cushioned my head in my hands and gazed directly up towards the zenith of heaven. Through the smooth cold stones I rested on, I thought I could sense beneath me, like a living force, the stupendous gravity and mass of the pyramid.



Thinking like giants
Covering a full 13.1 acres at the base, it weighed about six million tons— more than all the buildings in the Square Mile of the City of London added together,21 and consisted, as we have seen, of roughly 2.3 million individual blocks of limestone and granite. To these had once been added a 22-acre, mirror-like cladding consisting of an estimated 115,000 highly polished casing stones, each weighing 10 tons, which had originally covered all four of its faces.22

After being shaken loose by a massive earthquake in AD 1301, the majority of the facing blocks had subsequently been removed for the construction of Cairo.23 Here and there around the base, however, I knew that enough had remained in position to permit the great nineteenth century archaeologist, W.M. Flinders Petrie, to carry out a detailed study of them.



21 How the Pyramids Were Built, p. 4-5.

22 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, pp. 232, 244.

23 Ibid., p. 17.



He had been stunned to encounter tolerances of less than one-hundredth of an inch and cemented joints so precise and so carefully aligned that it was impossible to slip even the fine blade of a pocket knife between them.

‘Merely to place such stones in exact contact would be careful work’, he admitted, ‘but to do so with cement in the joint seems almost impossible; it is to be compared to the finest opticians’ work on a scale of acres.’24

Of course, the jointing of the casing stones was by no means the only ‘almost impossible’ feature of the Great Pyramid. The alignments to true north, south, east and west were ‘almost impossible’, so too were the near- perfect ninety-degree corners, and the incredible symmetry of the four enormous sides. And so were the engineering logistics of raising millions of huge stones hundreds of feet in the air ...

Whoever they had been, therefore, the architects, engineers and stonemasons who had designed and successfully built this stupendous monument must indeed have ‘thought like men 100 feet tall’, as Jean-François Champollion, the founder of modern Egyptology, had once observed.



He had seen clearly what generations of his successors were to close their eyes to: that the pyramid builders could only have been men of giant intellectual stature. Beside the Egyptians of old, he had added, ‘we in Europe are but Lilliputians.’25

24 Cited in Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 90.

25 Ibid., p. 40. Champollion of course, deciphered the Rosetta Stone.


Back to Contents





Chapter 35 - Tombs and Tombs Only?


Climbing down the Great Pyramid was more nerve wracking than climbing up. We were no longer struggling against the force of gravity, so the physical effort was less. But the possibilities of a fatal fall seemed greatly magnified now that our attention was directed exclusively towards the ground rather than the heavens. We picked our way with exaggerated care towards the base of the enormous mountain of stone, sliding and slithering among the treacherous masonry blocks, feeling as though we had been reduced to ants.

By the time we had completed the descent the night was over and the first wash of pale sunlight was filtering into the sky. We paid the 50 Egyptian pounds promised to the guard of the pyramid’s western face and then, with a tremendous sense of release and exultation, we walked jauntily away from the monument in the direction of the Pyramid of Khafre, a few hundred meters to the south-west.

Khufu, Khafre, Menkaure ... Cheops, Chephren, Mycerinus.



Whether they were referred to by their Egyptian or their Greek names, the fact remained that these three pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty (2575-2467 BC) were universally acclaimed as the builders of the Giza pyramids. This had been the case at least since Ancient Egyptian tour guides had told the Greek historian Herodotus that the Great Pyramid had been built by Khufu.



Herodotus had incorporated this information into the oldest surviving written description of the monuments, which continued:

Cheops, they said, reigned for fifty years, and on his death the kingship was taken over by his brother Chephren. He also made a pyramid ... it is forty feet lower than his brother’s pyramid, but otherwise of the same greatness ... Chephren reigned for fifty-six years ... then there succeeded Mycerinus, the son of Cheops ... This man left a pyramid much smaller than his father’s.1

1 Herodotus, The History (translated by David Grene), University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 187-9.

Site plan of the Giza necropolis


Herodotus saw the monuments in the fifth century BC, more than 2000 years after they had been built. Nevertheless it was largely on the foundation of his testimony that the entire subsequent judgment of history was based. All other commentators, up to the present, continued uncritically to follow in the Greek historian’s footsteps.



And down the ages—although it had originally been little more than hearsay—the attribution of the Great Pyramid to Khufu, the Second Pyramid to Khafre and the Third Pyramid to Menkaure had assumed the stature of unassailable fact.



Trivializing the mystery
Having parted company with Ali, Santha and I continued our walk into the desert. Skirting the immense south-western corner of the Second Pyramid, our eyes were drawn towards its summit. There we noted again the intact facing stones that still covered its top 22 courses.



We also noticed that the first few courses above its base, each of which had a ‘footprint’ of about a dozen acres, were composed of truly massive blocks of limestone, almost too high to clamber over, which were about 20 feet long and 6 feet thick. These extraordinary monoliths, as I was later to discover, weighed 200 tons apiece and belonged to a distinct style of masonry to be found at several different and widely scattered locations within the Giza necropolis.

On its north and west sides the Second Pyramid sat on a level platform cut down out of the surrounding bedrock and was thus enclosed within a wide trench more than 15 feet deep in places. Walking due south, parallel to the monument’s scarred western flank, we picked our way along the edge of this trench towards the much smaller Third Pyramid, which lay some 400 metres ahead of us in the desert.

Khufu ... Khafre ... Menkaure ... According to all orthodox Egyptologists the pyramids had been built as tombs—and only as tombs—for these three pharaohs.



Yet there were some obvious difficulties with such assertions. For example, the spacious burial chamber of the Khafre Pyramid was empty when it was opened in 1818 by the European explorer Giovanni Belzoni. Indeed, more than empty, the chamber was starkly, austerely bare.



The polished granite sarcophagus which lay embedded in its floor had also been found empty, with its lid broken into two pieces nearby.2 How was this to be explained?

To Egyptologists the answer seemed obvious. At some early date, probably not many hundreds of years after Khafre’s death, tomb robbers must have penetrated the chamber and cleared all its contents including the mummified body of the pharaoh.

Much the same thing seemed to have happened at the smaller Third Pyramid, towards which Santha and I were now walking—that attributed to Menkaure. Here the first European to break in had been a British colonel, Howard Vyse, who had entered the burial chamber in 1837. He found an empty basalt sarcophagus, an anthropoid coffin lid made of wood, and some bones. The natural assumption was that these were the remains of Menkaure.



Modern science had subsequently proved, however, that the bones and coffin lid dated from the early Christian era, that is, from 2500 years after the Pyramid Age, and thus represented the ‘intrusive burial’ of a much later individual (quite a common practice throughout Ancient Egyptian history).



As to the basalt sarcophagus—well, it could have belonged to Menkaure. Unfortunately, however, nobody had the opportunity to examine it because it had been lost at sea when the ship on which Vyse sent it to England had sunk off the coast of Spain.3 Since it was a matter of record that the sarcophagus had been found empty by Vyse, it was once again assumed that the body of the pharaoh must have been removed by tomb robbers.

A similar assumption had been made about the body of Khufu, which was also missing. Here the scholarly consensus, expressed as well as anyone by George Hart of the British Museum, was that ‘no later than 500 years after Khufu’s funeral’ robbers had forced their way into the Great Pyramid ‘to steal the burial treasure’.4


2 The Riddle of the Pyramids, p. 54.

3 Ibid., p. 55.
4 George Hart, Pharaohs and Pyramids, Guild Publishing, London, 1991, p. 91.

The implication is that this incursion must have occurred by or before 2000 BC—since Khufu is believed to have died in 2528 BC.5 Moreover it was assumed by Professor I.E.S Edwards, a leading authority on these matters, that the burial treasure had been removed from the famous inner sanctum now known as the King’s Chamber and that the empty ‘granite sarcophagus’ which stood at the western end of that sanctum had ‘once contained the King’s body, probably enclosed within an inner coffin made of wood’.6

All this is orthodox, mainstream, modern scholarship, which is unquestioningly accepted as historical fact and taught as such at universities everywhere.7



But suppose it isn’t fact.


5 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.

6 The Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 94-5.
7 The Pyramids of Egypt by Professor I. E. S. Edwards is the standard text on the pyramids.


The cupboard was bare
The mystery of the missing mummy of Khufu begins with the records of Caliph Al-Ma’mun, a Muslim governor of Cairo in the ninth century AD. He had engaged a team of quarriers to tunnel their way into the pyramid’s northern face, urging them on with promises that they would discover treasure.



Through a series of lucky accidents ‘Ma’mun’s Hole’, as archaeologists now refer to it, had joined up with one of the monument’s several internal passageways, the ‘descending corridor’ leading downwards from the original concealed doorway in the northern face (the location of which, though known in classical times, had been forgotten by Ma’mun’s day).



By a further lucky accident the vibrations that the Arabs had caused with their battering rams and drills dislodged a block of limestone from the ceiling of the descending corridor. When the socket from which it had fallen was examined it was found to conceal the opening to another corridor, this time ascending into the heart of the pyramid.

There was a problem, however. The opening was blocked by a series of enormous plugs of solid granite, clearly contemporaneous with the construction of the monument, which were held in place by a narrowing of the lower end of the corridor.8



8 W. M. Flinders Petrie, The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh (New and Revised Edition), Histories and Mysteries of Man Ltd., London, 1990, p. 21.


The quarriers were unable either to break or to cut through the plugs. They therefore tunnelled into the slightly softer limestone surrounding them and, after several weeks of backbreaking toil, rejoined the ascending corridor higher up—having bypassed a formidable obstacle never before breached.

The implications were obvious. Since no previous treasure-seekers had penetrated this far, the interior of the pyramid must still be virgin territory. The diggers must have licked their lips with anticipation at the immense quantities of gold and jewels they could now expect to find. Similarly—though perhaps for different reasons, Ma’mun must have been impatient to be the first into any chambers that lay ahead.



It was reported that his primary motive in initiating this investigation had not been an ambition to increase his vast personal wealth but a desire to gain access to a storehouse of ancient wisdom and technology which he believed to lie buried within the monument. In this repository, according to age-old tradition, the pyramid builders had placed,

‘instruments of iron and arms which rust not, and glasse which might be bended and yet not broken, and strange spells ...’9

9 John Greaves, Pyramidographia, cited in Serpent in the Sky, p. 230.

The Great Pyramid: entrance and plugging blocks in the ascending corridor.

The Great Pyramid: detail of corridors, shafts and chambers.


But Ma’mun and his men found nothing, not even any down-to-earth treasure—and certainly not any high-tech, anachronistic plastic or instruments of iron or rustproof weapons ... or strange spells either.

The erroneously named ‘Queen’s Chamber’ (which lay at the end a long horizontal passageway that branched off from the ascending corridor) turned out to be completely empty—just a severe, geometrical room.10

More disappointing still, the King’s Chamber (which the Arabs reached after climbing the imposing Grand Gallery) also offered little of interest. Its only furniture was a granite coffer just big enough to contain the body of a man. Later identified, on no very good grounds, as a ‘sarcophagus’, this undecorated stone box was approached with trepidation by Ma’mun and his team, who found it to be lidless and as empty as everything else in the pyramid.11


10 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 11.

11 The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 120.

Why, how and when exactly had the Great Pyramid been emptied of its contents?

Had it been 500 years after Khufu’s death, as the Egyptologists suggested?

Or was it not more likely, as the evidence was beginning to suggest, that the inner chambers of the pyramid had been empty all along, from the very beginning, that is, from the day that the monument had originally been sealed?

Nobody, after all, had reached the upper part of the ascending corridor before Ma’mun and his men. And it was certain, too, that nobody had cut through the granite plugs blocking the entrance to that corridor.

Commonsense ruled out the possibility of any earlier incursion—unless there was another way in.


Bottlenecks in the well-shaft
There was another way in.

Farther down the descending corridor, more than 200 feet beyond the point where the plugged end of the ascending corridor had been found, lies the concealed entrance to another secret passageway, deep within the subterranean bedrock of the Giza plateau. If Ma’mun had discovered this passageway, he could have saved himself a great deal of trouble, since it provided a readymade route around the plugs blocking the ascending corridor.



His attention, however, had been distracted by the challenge of tunnelling past those plugs, and he made no effort to investigate the lower reaches of the descending corridor (which he ended up using as a dump for the tons of stone his diggers removed from the core of the pyramid).12

The full extent of the descending corridor was, however, well-known and explored in classical times. The Graeco-Roman geographer Strabo left quite a clear description of the large subterranean chamber it debouched into (at a depth of almost 600 feet below the apex of the pyramid).13 Graffiti from the period of the Roman occupation of Egypt was also found inside this underground chamber, confirming that it had once been regularly visited.



Yet, because it had been so cunningly hidden in the beginning, the secret doorway leading off to one side about two-thirds of the way down the western wall of the descending corridor, remained sealed and undiscovered until the nineteenth century.14

What the doorway led to was a narrow well-shaft, about 160 feet in extent, which rose almost vertically through the bedrock and then through more than twenty complete courses of the Great Pyramid’s limestone core blocks, until it joined up with the main internal corridor system at the base of the Grand Gallery. There is no evidence to indicate what the purpose of this strange architectural feature might have been (although several scholars have hazarded guesses).15



Indeed the only thing that is clear is that it was engineered at the time of the construction of the pyramid and was not the result of an intrusion by tunnelling tomb-robbers.16 The question remains open, however, as to whether tomb-robbers might have discovered the hidden entrance to the shaft, and made use of it to siphon off the treasures from the King’s and Queen’s Chambers.


12 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 58.
13 The Geography of Strabo, (trans. H. L. Jones), Wm. Heinemann, London, 1982, volume VIII, pp. 91-3.

14 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 58.
15 In general, it is assumed to have been used as an escape route by workers sealed within the pyramid above the plugging blocks in the ascending passage.
16 Because, over a distance of several hundred feet through solid masonry, it joins two narrow corridors. This could not have been achieved by accident.

Such a possibility cannot be ruled out. Nevertheless, a review of the historical record indicates little in its favour.

For example, the upper end of the well-shaft was entered off the Grand Gallery by the Oxford astronomer John Greaves in 1638. He managed to descend to a depth of about sixty feet. In 1765 another Briton, Nathaniel Davison, penetrated to a depth of about 150 feet but found his way blocked by an impenetrable mass of sand and stones. Later, in the 1830s, Captain G.B. Caviglia, an Italian adventurer, reached the same depth and encountered the same obstacle.



More enterprising than his predecessors, he hired Arab workers to start excavating the rubble in the hope that there might be something of interest beneath it. Several days of digging in claustrophobic conditions followed before the connection with the descending corridor was discovered.17

Is it likely that such a cramped, blocked-up shaft could have been a viable conduit for the treasures of Khufu, supposedly the greatest pharaoh of the magnificent Fourth Dynasty?

Even if it hadn’t been choked with debris and sealed at the lower end, it could not have been used to bring out more than a tiny fraction of the treasures of a typical royal tomb. This is because the well-shaft is only three feet in diameter and incorporates several tricky vertical sections.

At the very least, therefore, when Ma’mun and his men battered their way into the King’s Chamber around the year AD 820, one would have expected some of the bigger and heavier pieces from the original burial to be still in place—like the statues and shrines that bulked so large in Tutankhamen’s much later and presumably inferior tomb.18



17 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, pp. 56-8.

18 See Nicholas Reeves, The Complete Tutankhamun, Thames & Hudson, London, 1990.



But nothing was found inside Khufu’s Pyramid, making this and the alleged looting of Khafre’s monument the only tomb robberies in the history of Egypt which achieved a clean sweep, leaving not a single trace behind—not a torn cloth, not a shard of broken pottery, not an unwanted figurine, not an overlooked piece of jewellery—just the bare floors and walls and the gaping mouths of empty sarcophagi.



Not like other tombs
It was now after six in the morning and the rising sun had bathed the summits of Khufu’s and Khafre’s Pyramids with a fleeting blush of pastel-pink light. Menkaure’s Pyramid, being some 200 feet lower than the other two, was still in shadow as Santha and I skirted its north-western corner and continued our walk into the rolling sand dunes of the surrounding desert.

I still had the tomb robbery theory on my mind. As far as I could see the only real ‘evidence’ in favour of it was the absence of grave goods and mummies that it had been invented to explain in the first place. All the other facts, particularly where the Great Pyramid was concerned, seemed to speak persuasively against any robbery having occurred. It was not just a matter of the narrowness and unsuitability of the well-shaft as an escape route for bulky treasures.



The other remarkable feature of Khufu’s Pyramid was the absence of inscriptions or decorations anywhere within its immense network of galleries, corridors, passageways and chambers, and the same was true of Khafre’s and Menkaure’s Pyramids. In none of these amazing monuments had a single word been written in praise of the pharaohs whose bodies they were supposed to house.

This was exceptional. No other proven burial place of any Egyptian monarch had ever been found undecorated. The fashion throughout Egyptian history had been for the tombs of the pharaohs to be extensively decorated, beautifully painted from top to bottom (as in the Valley of the Kings at Luxor, for example) and densely inscribed with the ritual spells and invocations required to assist the deceased on his journey towards eternal life (as in the Fifth Dynasty pyramids at Saqqara, just twenty miles to the south of Giza.)19



19 See Valley of the Kings; for Saqqara (Fifth and Sixth Dynasties) see Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, pp. 163-7.

Why had Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure done things so differently?

Had they not built their monuments to serve as tombs at all, but for another and more subtle purpose?

Or was it possible, as certain Arab and esoteric traditions maintained, that the Giza pyramids had been erected long before the Fourth Dynasty by the architects of some earlier and more advanced civilization?

Neither hypothesis was popular with Egyptologists for reasons that were easy to understand. Moreover, while conceding that the Second and Third Pyramids were completely devoid of internal inscriptions, lacking even the names of Khafre and Menkaure, the scholars were able to cite certain hieroglyphic ‘quarry marks’ (graffiti daubed on stone blocks before they left the quarry) found inside the Great Pyramid, which did seem to bear the name of Khufu.



A certain smell ...
The discoverer of the quarry marks was Colonel Howard Vyse, during the destructive excavations he undertook at Giza in 1837. Extending an existing crawlway, he cut a tunnel into the series of narrow cavities, called ‘relieving chambers’, which lay directly above the King’s Chamber.



The quarry marks were found on the walls and ceilings of the top four of these cavities and said things like this:


THE CRAFTSMEN-GANG,

HOW POWERFUL IS THE WHITE CROWN OF KHNUM—

KHUFU
KHUFU
KHNUM-KHUFU
YEAR SEVENTEEN20


It was all very convenient. Right at the end of a costly and otherwise fruitless digging season, just when a major archaeological discovery was needed to legitimize the expenses he had run up, Vyse had stumbled upon the find of the decade—the first incontrovertible proof that Khufu had indeed been the builder of the hitherto anonymous Great Pyramid.

One would have thought that a discovery of this nature would have settled conclusively any lingering doubts over the ownership and purpose of that enigmatic monument. But the doubts remained, largely because, from the beginning, ‘a certain smell’ hung over Vyse’s evidence:

1 - It was odd that the marks were the only signs of the name Khufu ever found anywhere inside the Great Pyramid.21

2 - It was odd that they had been found in such an obscure, out-of-theway corner of that immense building.

3 - It was odd that they had been found at all in a monument otherwise devoid of inscriptions of any kind.

4 - And it was extremely odd that they had been found only in the top four of the five relieving chambers. Inevitably, suspicious minds began to wonder whether ‘quarry marks’ might also have appeared in the lowest of these five chambers had that chamber, too, been discovered by Vyse (rather than by Nathaniel Davison seventy years earlier).22

5 - Last but not least it was odd that several of the hieroglyphs in the ‘quarry marks’ had been painted upside down, and that some were unrecognizable while others had been misspelt or used ungrammatically.23

Was Vyse a forger?

I know of one plausible case made to suggest he was exactly that,24 and although final proof will probably always be lacking, it seemed to me incautious of academic Egyptology to have accepted the authenticity of the quarry marks without question. Besides, there was alternative hieroglyphic evidence, arguably of purer provenance, which appeared to indicate that Khufu could not have built the Great Pyramid.


20 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 211-12; The Great Pyramid: Your Personal Guide, p. 71.

21 Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 96.

22 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 35-6.

23 Zecharia Sitchin, The Stairway To Heaven, Avon Books, New York, 1983, pp. 253-82.

24 Ibid.

Strangely, the same Egyptologists who readily ascribed immense importance to Vyse’s quarry marks were quick to downplay the significance of these other, contradictory, hieroglyphs, which appeared on a rectangular limestone stela which now stood in the Cairo Museum.25

The Inventory Stela, as it was called, had been discovered at Giza in the nineteenth century by the French archaeologist Auguste Mariette. It was something of a bombshell because its text clearly indicated that both the Great Sphinx and the Great Pyramid (as well as several other structures on the plateau) were already in existence long before Khufu came to the throne.



The inscription also referred to Isis as the ‘Mistress of the Pyramid’, implying that the monument had been dedicated to the goddess of magic and not to Khufu at all. Finally, there was a strong suggestion that Khufu’s pyramid might have been one of the three subsidiary structures alongside the Great Pyramid’s eastern flank.26

All this looked like damaging evidence against the orthodox chronology of Ancient Egypt. It also challenged the consensus view that the Giza pyramids had been built as tombs and only as only. However, rather than investigating the anachronistic statements in the Inventory Stela, Egyptologists chose to devalue them. In the words of the influential American scholar James Henry Breasted, ‘These references would be of the highest importance if the stela were contemporaneous with Khufu; but the orthographic evidences of its late date are entirely conclusive ...’27

Breasted meant that the nature of the hieroglyphic writing system used in he inscription was not consistent with that used in the Fourth Dynasty but belonged to a more recent epoch: All Egyptologists concurred with this analysis and the final judgement, still accepted today, was that the stela had been carved in the Twenty-First Dynasty, about 1500 years after Khufu’s reign, and was therefore to be regarded as a work of historical fiction.28



25 James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt: Historical Documents from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest, reprinted by Histories and Mysteries of Man Ltd., London, 1988, pp. 83-5.

26 Ibid., p. 85.

27 Ibid., p. 84.

28 Ibid., and Travellers Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 139.

Thus, citing orthographic evidence, an entire academic discipline found reason to ignore the boat-rocking implications of the Inventory Stela and at no time gave proper consideration to the possibility that it could have been based upon a genuine Fourth Dynasty inscription (just as the New English Bible, for example, is based on a much older original). Exactly the same scholars, however, had accepted the authenticity of a set of dubious ‘quarry marks’ without demur, turning a blind eye to their orthographic and other peculiarities.

Why the double standard? Could it have been because the information contained in the ‘quarry marks’ conformed strictly to orthodox opinion that the Great Pyramid had been built as a tomb for Khufu? whereas the information in the Inventory Stela contradicted that opinion?



Overview
By seven in the morning Santha and I had walked far out into the desert to the south-west of the Giza pyramids and had made ourselves comfortable in the lee of a huge dune that offered an unobstructed panorama over the entire site.

The date, 16 March, was just a few days away from the Spring Equinox, one of the two occasions in the year when the sun rose precisely due east of wherever you stood in the world. Ticking out the days like the pointer of a giant metronome, it had bisected the horizon this morning at a point a hair’s breadth south of due east and had already climbed high enough to shrug off the Nile mists which clung like a shroud to much of the city of Cairo.

Khufu, Khafre, Menkaure ... Cheops, Chephren, Mycerinus. Whether you called them by their Egyptian or their Greek names, there was no doubt that the three famous pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty had been commemorated by the most splendid, the most honourable, the most beautiful and the most enormous monuments ever seen anywhere in the world.



Moreover, it was clear that these pharaohs must indeed have been closely associated with the monuments, not only because of the folklore passed on by Herodotus (which surely had some basis in fact) but because inscriptions and references to Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure had been found in moderate quantities, outside the three major pyramids, at several different parts of the Giza necropolis. Such finds had been made consistently in and around the six subsidiary pyramids, three of which lay to the east of the Great Pyramid and the other three to the south of the Menkaure Pyramid.

Since much of this external evidence was ambiguous and uncertain, I found it difficult to understand why the Egyptologists were happy to go on citing it as confirmation of the ‘tombs and tombs only’ theory.

The problem was that this same evidence was capable of supporting— as equally valid—a number of different and mutually contradictory interpretations. To give just one example, the ‘close association’ observed between the three great pyramids and the three Fourth Dynasty pharaohs could indeed have come about because these pharaohs had built the pyramids as their tombs. But it could also have come about if the gigantic monuments of the Giza plateau had been standing long before the dawn of the historical civilization known as Dynastic Egypt.



In that case, it was only necessary to assume that in due course Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure had come along and built a number of the subsidiary structures around the three older pyramids—something that they would have had every reason to do because in this way they could have appropriated the high prestige of the original anonymous monuments (and would, almost certainly, be viewed by posterity as their builders).

There were other possibilities too. The point was, however, that the evidence for exactly who had built which great pyramid, when and for what purpose was far too thin on the ground to justify the dogmatism of the orthodox ‘tombs and tombs only’ theory. In all honesty, it was not clear who built the pyramids. It was not clear in what epoch they had been built. And it was not at all clear what their function had been.

For all these reasons they were surrounded by a wonderful, impenetrable air of mystery and as I gazed down at them out of the desert they seemed to march towards me across the dunes ...


Back to Contents





Chapter 36 - Anomalies


Viewed from our vantage point in the desert south west of the Giza necropolis, the site plan of the three great pyramids seemed majestic but bizarre.

Menkaure’s pyramid was closest to us, with Khafre’s and Khufu’s monuments behind it to the north-east. These two were situated along a near perfect diagonal—a straight line connecting the south-western and north-eastern corners of the pyramid of Khafre would, if extended to the north-east, also pass through the south-western and north-eastern corners of the Great Pyramid.



This, presumably, was not an accident. From where we sat, however, it was easy to see that if the same imaginary straight line was extended to the south-west it would completely miss the Third Pyramid, the entire body of which was offset to the east of the principal diagonal.

Egyptologists refused to recognize any anomaly in this. Why should they? As far as they were concerned there was no site plan at Giza. The pyramids were tombs and tombs only, built for three different pharaohs over a period of about seventy-five years.1 It made sense to assume that each ruler would have sought to express his own personality and idiosyncrasies through his monument, and this was probably why Menkaure had ‘stepped out of line’.

The Egyptologists were wrong. Though I was unaware of it that March morning in 1993, a breakthrough had been made proving beyond doubt that the necropolis did have an overall site plan, which dictated the exact positioning of the three pyramids not only in relation to one another but in relation to the River Nile a few kilometers east of the Giza plateau.



With eerie fidelity, this immense and ambitious layout modelled a celestial phenomenon2—which was perhaps why Egyptologists (who pride themselves on looking exclusively at the ground beneath their feet) had failed to spot it. On a truly giant scale, as we see in later chapters, it also reflected the same obsessive concern with orientations and dimensions demonstrated in each of the monuments.



1 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.

2 The Orion Mystery.



A singular oppression ...
Giza, Egypt, 16 March 1993, 8 a.m.

At a little over 200 feet tall (and with a side length at the base of 356 feet) the Third Pyramid was less than half the height and well under half the mass of the Great Pyramid. Nevertheless, it possessed a stunning and imposing majesty of its own. As we stepped out of the desert sunlight and into its huge geometrical shadow, I remembered what the Iraqi writer Abdul Latif had said about it when he had visited it in the twelfth century:

‘It appears small compared with the other two; but viewed at a short distance and to the exclusion of these, it excites in the imagination a singular oppression and cannot be contemplated without painfully affecting the sight ...’3

The lower sixteen courses of the monument were still cased, as they had been since the beginning, with facing blocks quarried out of red granite (‘so extremely hard’, in Abdul Latif s words, ‘that iron takes a long time, with difficulty, to make an impression on it’).4 Some of the blocks were very large; they were also closely and cunningly fitted together in a complex interlocking jigsaw-puzzle pattern strongly reminiscent of the cyclopean masonry at Cuzco, Machu Picchu and other locations in far-off Peru.

As was normal, the entrance to the Third Pyramid was situated in its northern face well above the ground. From here, at an angle of 26° 2’, a descending corridor lanced arrow-straight down into the darkness.5 Oriented exactly north to south, this corridor was rectangular in section and so cramped that we had to bend almost double to fit into it. Where it passed through the masonry of the monument its ceiling and walls consisted of well-fitted granite blocks. More surprisingly, these continued for some distance below ground level.



3 Abdul Latif, The Eastern Key, cited in Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 126.

4 Ibid.
5 Blue Guide: Egypt, A & C Black, London, 1988, p. 433.

At about seventy feet from the entrance, the corridor levelled off and opened out into a passageway where we could stand up. This led into a small ante-chamber with carved panelling and grooves cut into its walls, apparently to take portcullis slabs. Reaching the end of the chamber, we had to crouch again to enter another corridor. Bent double, we proceeded south for about forty feet before reaching the first of the three main burial chambers—if burial chambers they were.

These sombre, soundless rooms were all hewn out of solid bedrock. The one that we stood in was rectangular in plan and oriented east to west. Measuring about 30 feet long x 15 wide x 15 high, it had a flat ceiling and a complex internal structure with a large, irregular hole in its western wall leading into a dark, cave-like space beyond. There was also an opening near the centre of the floor which gave access to a ramp, sloping westwards, leading down to even deeper levels. We descended the ramp.



It terminated in a short, horizontal passage to the right of which, entered through a narrow doorway, lay a small empty chamber, Six cells, like the sleeping quarters of medieval monks, had been hewn out of its walls: four on the eastern side and two to the north. These were presumed by Egyptologists to have functioned as ‘magazines ... for storing objects which the dead king wished to have close to his body.’6

Coming out of this chamber, we turned right again, back into the horizontal passage. At its end lay another empty chamber,7 the design of which is unique among the pyramids of Egypt. Some twelve feet long by eight wide, and oriented north to south, its walls and extensively broken and damaged floor were fashioned out of a peculiarly dense, chocolate-coloured granite which seemed to absorb light and sound waves.



Its ceiling consisted of eighteen huge slabs of the same material, nine on each side, laid in facing gables. Because they had had been hollowed from below to form a markedly concave surface, the effect of these great monoliths was of a perfect barrel vault, much as one might expect to find in the crypt of a Romanesque cathedral.

Retracing our steps, we left the lower chambers and walked back up the ramp to the large, flat-roofed, rock-hewn room above. Passing through the ragged aperture in its western wall, we found ourselves looking directly at the upper sides of the eighteen slabs which formed the ceiling of the chamber below. From this perspective their true form as a pointed gable was immediately apparent. What was less clear was how they had been brought in here in the first place, let alone laid so perfectly in position.



Each one must have weighed many tons, heavy enough to have made them extremely difficult to handle under any circumstances. And these were no ordinary circumstances. As though they had set out deliberately to make things more complicated for themselves (or perhaps because they found such tasks simple?) the pyramid builders had disdained to provide an adequate working area between the slabs and the bedrock above them.



By crawling into the cavity, I was able to establish that the clearance varied from approximately two feet at the southern end to just a few inches at the northern end. In such a restricted space there was no possibility that the monoliths could have been lowered into position. Logically, therefore, they must have been raised from the chamber floor, but how had that been done? The chamber was so small that only a few men could have worked inside it at any one time—too few to have had the muscle-power to lift the slabs by brute force.



Pulleys were not supposed to have existed in the Pyramid Age8 (even if they had, there would have been insufficient room to set up block-and-tackle).

Had some unknown system of levers been used?

Or might there be more substance than scholars realized to the Ancient Egyptian legends that spoke of huge stones being effortlessly levitated by priests or magicians through the utterance of ‘words of power’?9

6 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 127.
7 It was in this chamber that Vyse found the intrusive burial (of bones and a wooden coffin lid) referred to in Chapter Thirty-Five. The basalt coffin where he also found (later lost at sea) is believed to have been part of the same intrusive burial and to have not been older than the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. See, for example, Blue Guide, Egypt, p. 433.

8 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 220.

9 See, for example, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume II, p. 180. 10 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 117.

Not for the first time when confronted by the mysteries of the pyramids I knew that I was looking at an impossible engineering feat which had nevertheless been carried out to astonishingly high and precise standards. Moreover, if Egyptologists were to be believed, the construction work had supposedly been undertaken at the dawn of human civilization by a people who had not accumulated any experience of massive construction projects.

This was, of course, a startling cultural paradox, and one for to which no adequate explanation had ever been offered by an orthodox academic.



The moving finger writes and having writ it moves on
Leaving the underground chambers, which seemed to vibrate at the core of the Third Pyramid like the convoluted, multi-valved heart of some slumbering Leviathan, we made our way along the narrow entrance corridor and into the open air.

Our objective now was the Second Pyramid. We walked along its western flank (just under 708 feet in length), turned right and eventually came to the point on its north side, about 40 feet east of the main north-south axis, where the principal entrances were located. One of these was carved directly into the bedrock at ground level about 30 feet in front of the monument; the other was cut into the northern face at a height of just under 50 feet.

Above Chamber and passageway system of the Pyramid of Menkaure.

Below Chamber and passageway system of the Pyramid of Khafre.


In many ways this—rather than the absence of identifying marks—was the central problem. Prior to the reigns of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure there was not a single pharaoh whose name could be put forward as a candidate. Khufu’s father Sneferu, the first king of the Fourth Dynasty, was believed to have built the so-called ‘Bent’ and ‘Red’ Pyramids at Dahshur, about thirty miles south of Giza—an attribution that was itself mysterious (if pyramids were indeed tombs) since it seemed strange that one pharaoh required two pyramids to be buried in.



Sneferu was also credited by some Egyptologists with the construction of the ‘Collapsed’ Pyramid at Meidum (although a number of authorities insisted that this was the tomb of Huni, the last king of the Third Dynasty).12

12 The Riddle of the Pyramids, p. 49.

The only other builders in the Archaic Period had been Zoser, the second pharaoh of the Third Dynasty, to whom was attributed the construction of the ‘Step Pyramid’ at Saqqara,13 and Zoser’s successor, Sekhemkhet, whose pyramid also stood at Saqqara. Therefore, despite the lack of inscriptions, it was now assumed as obvious that the three pyramids at Giza must have been built by Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure and must have been intended to serve as their tombs.

We need not reiterate here the many shortcomings of the ‘tombs and tombs only’ theory. However, these shortcomings were not limited to the Giza pyramids but applied to all the other Third and Fourth Dynasty Pyramids listed above. Not a single one of these monuments had ever been found to contain the body of a pharaoh, or any signs whatsoever of a royal burial.14 Some of them were not even equipped with sarcophagi, for example the Collapsed Pyramid at Meidum.



The Pyramid of Sekhemkhet at Saqqara (first entered in 1954 by the Egyptian Antiquities Organization) did contain a sarcophagus—one, which had certainly remained sealed and undisturbed since its installation in the ‘tomb’.15 Grave robbers had never succeeded in finding their way to it, but when it was opened, it was empty.16



13 Ibid., pp. 36-9.
14 Ibid., p. 74.
15 Ibid., p. 42.
16 Ibid.

So what was going on? How come more than twenty-five million tons of stone had been piled up to form pyramids at Giza, Dahshur, Meidum and Saqqara if the only point of the exercise had been to install empty sarcophagi in empty chambers? Even admitting the hypothetical excesses of one or two megalomaniacs, it seemed unlikely that a whole succession of pharaohs would have sanctioned such wastefulness.



Pandora’s Box
Buried beneath the five million tons of the Second Pyramid at Giza, Santha and I now stepped into the monument’s spacious inner chamber, which might have been a tomb but might equally have served some other as yet unidentified purpose. Measuring 46.5 feet in length from east to west, and 16.5 in breadth from north to south, this naked and sterile apartment was topped off with an immensely strong gabled ceiling reaching a height of 22.5 feet at its apex.



The gable slabs, each a massive 20-ton limestone monolith, had been laid in position at an angle of 53° 7’ 28” (which exactly matched the angle of slope of the pyramid’s sides).17 Here there were no relieving chambers (as there were above the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid). Instead, for more than 4000 years—perhaps far more—the gabled ceiling had taken the immense weight of the second largest stone building in the world.

17 The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 123; The Pyramids Of Egypt, p. 118.

I looked slowly around the room, which reflected a yellowish-white radiance back at me. Quarried directly out of the living bedrock, its walls were not at all smoothly finished, as one might have expected, but were noticeably rough and irregular.



The floor too was peculiar: of split-level design with a step about a foot deep separating its eastern and western halves. The supposed sarcophagus of Khafre lay near the western wall, embedded in the floor. Measuring just over six feet in length, quite shallow, and somewhat narrow to have contained the wrapped and embalmed mummy of a noble pharaoh, its smooth red granite sides reached to about knee height.

As I gazed into its dark interior, it seemed to gape like the doorway to another dimension.

Chapter 37 - Made by Some God


I had climbed the Great Pyramid the night before, but as I approached it in the full glare of midday, I experienced no sense of triumph. On the contrary, standing at its base on the north side, I felt fly-sized and puny— an impermanent creature of flesh and blood confronted with the awe-inspiring splendour of eternity.



I had the impression that it might have been here for ever, ‘made by some god and set down bodily in the surrounding sand’, as the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus commented in the first century BC.1 But which god had made it, if not the God-King Khufu whose name generations of Egyptians had associated with it?

For the second time in twelve hours, I began to climb the monument. Up close in this light, indifferent to human chronologies and subject only to the slow erosive forces of geological time, it reared above me like a frowning, terrifying crag. Fortunately, I only had six courses to clamber over, assisted in places by modern steps, before reaching Ma’mun’s Hole, which now served as the pyramid’s principal entrance.

The original entrance, still well-hidden in the ninth century when Ma’mun began tunnelling, was some ten courses higher, 55 feet above ground level and 24 feet east of the main north-south axis. Protected by giant limestone gables, it contained the mouth of the descending corridor, which led downwards at an angle of 26° 31’ 23”.



Strangely, although itself measuring only some 3 feet 5 inches x 3 feet 11 inches, this corridor was sandwiched between roofing blocks 8 feet 6 inches thick and 12 feet wide and a flooring slab (known as the ‘Basement Sheet’) 2 feet 6 inches thick and 33 feet wide.2



1 Diodorus Siculus, Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 217.

2 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 88; The Great Pyramid: Your Personal Guide, pp. 30-1.

Hidden structural features like these abounded in the Great Pyramid, manifesting both incredible complexity and apparent pointlessness. Nobody knew how blocks of this size had been successfully installed, neither did anybody know how they had been set so carefully in alignment with other blocks, or at such precise angles (because, as the reader may have realized, the 26° slope of the descending corridor was part of a deliberate and regular pattern). Nobody knew either why these things had been done.



The Beacon
Entering the pyramid through Ma’mun’s Hole did not feel right. It was like entering a cave or grotto cut into the side of a mountain; it lacked the sense of deliberate and geometrical purposefulness that would have been conveyed by the original descending corridor. Worse still, the dark and inauspicious horizontal tunnel leading inwards looked like an ugly, deformed thing and still bore the marks of violence where the Arab workmen had alternately heated and chilled the stones with fierce fires and cold vinegar before attacking them with hammers and chisels, battering rams and borers.

On the one hand, such vandalism seemed gross and irresponsible. On the other, a startling possibility had to be considered: was there not a sense in which the pyramid seemed to have been designed to invite human beings of intelligence and curiosity to penetrate its mysteries?



After all, if you were a pharaoh who wanted to ensure that his deceased body remained inviolate for eternity, would it make better sense,

(a) to advertise to your own and all subsequent generations the whereabouts of your burial place, or

(b) to choose some secret and unknown location, of which you would never speak and where you might never be found?

The answer was obvious: you would go for secrecy and seclusion, as the vast majority of the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt had done.3



3 In the isolated Valley of the Kings in Luxor in upper Egypt, for example.

Why, then, if it was indeed a royal tomb, was the Great Pyramid so conspicuous?

Why did it occupy a ground area of more than thirteen acres?

Why was it almost 500 feet high?

Why, in other words, if its purpose was to conceal and protect the body of Khufu, had it been designed so that it could not fail to attract the attention—in all epochs and under all imaginable circumstances—of treasure-crazed adventurers and of prying and imaginative intellectuals?

It was simply not credible that the brilliant architects, stonemasons, surveyors and engineers who had created the Great Pyramid could have been ignorant of basic human psychology. The vast ambition and the transcendent beauty, power and artistry of their handiwork spoke of refined skills, deep insight, and a complete understanding of the symbols and primordial patterns by which the minds of men could be manipulated.



Logic therefore suggested that the pyramid builders must also have understood exactly what kind of beacon they were piling up (with such incredible precision) on this windswept plateau, on the west bank of the Nile, in those high and far away times.

They must, in short, have wanted this remarkable structure to exert a perennial fascination: to be violated by intruders, to be measured with increasing degrees of exactitude, and to haunt the collective imagination of mankind like a persistent ghost summoning intimations of a profound and long-forgotten secret.


Mind games of the pyramid builders
The point where Ma’mun’s Hole intersected with the 26° descending corridor was closed off by a modern steel door. Beyond it, to the north, that corridor sloped up until it reached the gables of the monument’s original entrance. To the south, as we have seen, the corridor sloped down for almost another 350 feet into the bedrock, before opening out into a huge subterranean chamber 600 feet beneath the apex of the pyramid. The accuracy of this corridor was astonishing. From top to bottom the average deviation from straight amounted to less than 1/4inch in the sides and 3/10-inch on the roof.4

Passing the steel door, I continued through Ma’mun’s tunnel, breathing in its ancient air and adjusting my eyes to the gloom of the low-wattage bulbs that lit it. Then ducking my head I began to climb through the steep and narrow section hacked upwards by the Arab diggers in their feverish thrust to by-pass the series of granite plugs blocking the lower part of the ascending corridor.



At the top of the tunnel two of the original plugs could be seen, still in situ but partially exposed by quarrying. Egyptologists assumed that they had been slid into their present position from above5—all the way down the lag-foot length of the ascending corridor from the foot of the Grand Gallery.6



Builders and engineers, however, whose trend of thought was perhaps more practical, had pointed out that it was physically impossible for the plugs to have been installed in this way. Because of the leaf-thin clearance that separated them from the walls, floor and ceiling of the corridor, friction would have foiled any ‘sliding’ operation in a matter of inches, let alone 100 feet.7



4 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 19.

5 Discussed in Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 230ff.

6 Dimension from The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 114.

7 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 230ff.

The puzzling implication was therefore that the ascending corridor must have been plugged while the pyramid was still being built. But why would anyone have wished to block the main entrance to the monument at such an early stage in its construction (even while continuing to enlarge and elaborate its inner chambers)?



Moreover, if the objective had been to deny intruders admission, wouldn’t it have been much easier and more efficient to have plugged the descending corridor from its entrance in the north face to a point below its junction with the ascending corridor? That would have been the most logical way to seal the pyramid and would have made plugs unnecessary in the ascending corridor.

There was only one certainty: since the beginning of history, the single known effect of the granite plugs had not been to prevent an intruder from gaining access; instead, like Bluebeard’s locked door, the barrier had magnetized Ma’mun’s attention and inflamed his curiosity so that he had felt compelled to tunnel his way past them, convinced that something of inestimable value must lie beyond them.

Might this not have been what the pyramid builders had intended the first intruder who reached this far to feel? It would be premature to rule out such a strange and unsettling possibility. At any rate, thanks to Ma’mun (and to the predictable constants of human nature) I was now able to insert myself into the unblocked upper section of the original ascending corridor. A smoothly cut aperture measuring 3 feet 5 inches wide x 3 feet 11 inches high (exactly the same dimensions as the descending corridor), it sloped up into the darkness at an angle of 26° 2’ 30” 8 (as against 26° 31’ 23” in the descending corridor).9

What was this meticulous interest in the angle of 26°, and was it a coincidence that it amounted to half of the angle of inclination of the pyramid’s sides—52°.10

The reader may recall the significance of this angle. It was a key ingredient of the sophisticated and advanced formula by which the design of the Great Pyramid had been made to correspond precisely to the dynamics of spherical geometry. Thus the original height of the monument (481.3949 feet), and the perimeter of its base (3023.16 feet), stood in the same ratio to each other as did the radius of a sphere to its circumference.



This ratio was 2pi (2 x 3.14) and to express it the builders had been obliged to specify the tricky and idiosyncratic angle of 52° for the pyramid’s sides (since any greater or lesser slope would have meant a different height-to-perimeter ratio).

In Chapter Twenty-three we saw that the so-called Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan in Mexico also expressed a knowledge and deliberate use of the transcendental number pi; in its case the height (233.5 feet) stood in a relationship of 4pi to the perimeter of its base (2932.76 feet).11



The crux, therefore, was that the most remarkable monument of Ancient Egypt and the most remarkable monument of Ancient Mexico both incorporated pi relationships long before and far away from the official ‘discovery’ of this transcendental number by the Greeks.12 Moreover, the evidence invited the conclusion that something was being signalled by the use of pi—almost certainly the same thing in both cases.



8 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 91.

9 Ibid., p. 88.
10 Or 51° 50’ 35” to be exact, Ibid., page 87; Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 112.

11 See Chapter Twenty-three.
12 Ibid.

Not for the first time, and not for the last, I was overwhelmed by a sense of contact with an ancient intelligence, not necessarily Egyptian or Mexican, which had found a way to reach out across the ages and draw people towards it like a beacon. Some might look for treasure; others, captivated by the deceptively simple manner in which the builders had used pi to demonstrate their mastery of the secrets of transcendental numbers, might be inspired to search for further mathematical epiphanies.

Bent almost double, my back brushing against the polished limestone ceiling, it was with such thoughts in my mind that I began to scramble up the 26° slope of the ascending corridor, which seemed to penetrate the vast bulk of the six million ton building like a trigonometrical device.



After I had banged my head on its ceiling a couple of times, however, I began to wonder why the ingenious people who’d designed it hadn’t made it two or three feet higher. If they could erect a monument like this in the first place (which they obviously could) and equip it with corridors, surely it would not have been beyond their capabilities to make those corridors roomy enough to stand up in?



Once again I was tempted to conclude that it was the result of a deliberate decision by the pyramid builders: they had made the ascending corridor this way because they had wanted it this way (rather than because such a design had been forced upon them.)

Was there motive in the apparent madness of these archaic mind games?



Unknown dark distance
At the top of the ascending corridor I emerged into yet another inexplicable feature of the pyramid, ‘the most celebrated architectural work to have survived from the Old Kingdom’13—the Grand Gallery. Soaring upwards at the continuing majestic angle of 26°, and almost entirely vanishing into the airy gloom above, its spacious corbelled vault made a stunning impression.

It was not my intention to climb the Grand Gallery yet. Branching off due south at its base was a long horizontal passageway, 3 feet 9 inches high and 127 feet in length, that led to the Queen’s Chamber.14 I wanted to revisit this room, which I had admired for its stark beauty since becoming acquainted with the Great Pyramid several years previously. Today, however, to my considerable irritation, the passageway was barred within a few feet of its entrance.

13 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 93.

14 Dimensions from Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 121, and The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 93.

The Grand Gallery and the King’s and Queen’s Chambers with their northern and southern shafts.


The reason, though I was unaware of it at the time, was that a German robotics engineer named Rudolf Gantenbrink was at work within, slowly and painstakingly manoeuvring a $250,000 robot up the narrow southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber. Hired by the Egyptian Antiquities Organization to improve the ventilation of the Great Pyramid, he had already used his high-tech equipment to clear debris from the King’s Chamber’s narrow ‘southern shaft’ (believed by Egyptologists to have been designed as a ventilation shaft in the first place) and had installed an electric fan at its mouth.



At the beginning of March 1993 he transferred his attentions to the Queen’s Chamber, deploying Upuaut, a miniaturized remote-controlled robot camera to explore its southern shaft.



On 22 March, some 200 feet along the steeply sloping shaft (which rose at an angle of 39.5° and was only about 8 inches high x 9 inches wide),15 the floor and walls suddenly became very smooth as Upuaut crawled into a section made of fine Tura limestone, the type normally used for lining sacred areas such as chapels or tombs.



That, in itself, was intriguing enough, but at the end of this corridor, apparently leading to a sealed chamber deep within the pyramid’s masonry, was a solid limestone door complete with metal fittings ...



15 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 24.

It had long been known that neither this southern shaft nor its counterpart in the Chamber’s northern wall had any exit on the outside of the Great Pyramid. In addition, and equally inexplicably, neither had originally been fully cut through. For some reason the builders had left the last five inches of stone intact in the last block over the mouth of each of the shafts, thus rendering them invisible and inaccessible to any casual intruder.

Why?

To make sure they would never be found?

Or to make sure that they would be found, some day, under the right circumstances?

After all, there had from the beginning been two conspicuous shafts in the King’s Chamber, penetrating the north and south walls. It should not have been beyond the mental powers of the pyramid builders to predict that sooner or later some inquiring person would be tempted to look for shafts in the Queen’s Chamber as well. In the event nobody did look for more than a thousand years after Caliph Ma’mun had opened the monument to the world in AD 820.



Then in 1872 an English engineer named Waynman Dixon, a Freemason who ‘had been led to suspect the existence of the shafts by their presence in the King’s Chamber above’,16 went tapping around the Queen’s Chamber’s walls and located them.



He opened the southern shaft first, setting his,

‘carpenter and man-of-allwork, Bill Grundy, to jump a hole with a hammer and steel chisel at that place. So to work the faithful fellow went, and with a will which soon began to make a way into the soft stone [limestone] at this point, when lo! after a comparatively very few strokes, flop went the chisel right through into something or other.’17

The ‘something or other’ Bill Grundy’s chisel had reached turned out to be,

‘a rectangular, horizontal, tubular channel, about 9 inches by 8 inches in transverse breadth and height, going back 7 feet into the wall, and then rising at an angle into an unknown, dark distance ...’18

It was up that angle, and into that ‘unknown dark distance’, 121 years later, that Rudolf Gantenbrink sent his robot—the technology of our species having finally caught up with our powerful instincts to pry.



Those instincts were clearly no weaker in 1872 than in 1993; among the many interesting things the remote-controlled camera succeeded in filming in the Queen’s Chamber shafts was the far end of a long, sectioned metal rod of nineteenth century design which Waynman Dixon and the faithful Bill Grundy had secretly stuffed up the intriguing channel.19



Predictably, they had assumed that if the pyramid builders had gone to the trouble of constructing and then concealing the shafts, then they must have hidden something worth looking for inside them.


16 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 92.

17 The Great Pyramid: Its Secrets and Mysteries Revealed, p. 428.

18 Ibid.
19 Presentation at the British Museum, 22 November 1993, by Rudolf Gantenbrink, of footage shot in the shafts by the robot camera Upuaut.


The notion that there might have been an intention from the outset to stimulate such investigations would seem quite implausible if the final upshot of the discovery and exploration of the shafts had been a dead-end. Instead, as we have seen, a door was found—a sliding, portcullis door with curious metal fittings and an enticing gap at its base beneath which the laser-spot projected by Gantenbrink’s robot was seen to disappear entirely ...

Once again there seemed to be a clear invitation to proceed further, the latest in a long line of invitations which had encouraged Caliph Ma’mun and his diggers to break into the central passageways and chambers of the monument, which had waited for Waynman Dixon to test the hypothesis that the walls of the Queen’s Chamber might contain concealed shafts, and which had then waited again until arousing the curiosity of Rudolf Gantenbrink, whose high-tech robot revealed the existence of the hidden door and brought within reach whatever secrets— or disappointments, or further invitations—might lie behind it.



The Queen’s Chamber
We shall hear more of Rudolf Gantenbrink and Upuaut in later chapters. 16 March 1993, however, knowing nothing of this, I was frustrated to find the Queen’s Chamber closed, and glared resentfully through the metal grille that barred its entrance corridor.

I remembered that the height of that corridor, 3 feet 9 inches, was not constant. Approximately 110 feet due south from where I stood, and only about 15 feet from the entrance to the Chamber, a sudden downward step in the floor increased the standing-room to 5 feet 8 inches.20 Nobody had come up with a convincing explanation for this peculiar feature.

The Queen’s Chamber itself—apparently empty since the day it was built—measured 17 feet 2 inches from north to south and 18 feet 10 inches from east to west. It was equipped with an elegant gabled ceiling, 20 feet 5 inches in height, which lay exactly along the east-west axis of the pyramid.21 Its floor, however, was the opposite of elegant and looked unfinished. There was a constant salty emanation through its pale, rough-hewn limestone walls, giving rise to much fruitless speculation.

In the north and south walls, still bearing the incised legend OPENED 1872, were the rectangular apertures discovered by Waynman Dixon which led into the dark distance of the mysterious shafts. The western wall was quite bare. Offset a little over two feet to the south of its centre line, the eastern wall was dominated by a niche in the form of a corbel vault 15 feet 4 inches high and 5 feet 2 inches wide at the base. Originally 3 feet 5 inches deep, a further cavity had been cut in the back of this niche in medieval times by Arab treasure-seekers looking for hidden chambers.22 They had found nothing.

Egyptologists had also been unable to come to any persuasive conclusions about the original function of the niche, or, for that matter, of the Queen’s Chamber as a whole.

20 The Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 92-3.

21 Ibid., p. 92; The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 23.

22 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 92.

All was confusion. All was paradox. All was mystery.



Instrument
The Grand Gallery had its mysteries too. Indeed it was among the most mysterious of all the internal features of the Great Pyramid. Measuring 6 feet 9 inches wide at the floor, its walls rose vertically to a height of 7 feet 6 inches; above that level seven further courses of masonry (each one projecting inwards some 3 inches beyond the course immediately below it) carried the vault to its full height of 28 feet and its culminating width of 3 feet 5 inches.23

Remember that structurally the Gallery was required to support, for ever, the multi-million ton weight of the upper three-quarters of the largest and heaviest stone monument ever built on planet earth. Was it not quite remarkable that a group of supposed ‘technological primitives’ had not only envisaged and designed such a feature but had completed it successfully, more than 4500 years before our time?

Even if they had made the Gallery only 20 feet long, and had sought to erect it on a level plane, the task would have been difficult enough— indeed extraordinarily difficult. But they had opted to erect this astonishing corbel vault at a slope of 26°, and to extend its length to a staggering 153 feet.24 Moreover, they had made it with perfectly dressed limestone megaliths throughout—huge, smoothly polished blocks carved into sloping parallelograms and laid together so closely and with such rigorous precision that the joints were almost invisible to the naked eye.

The pyramid builders had also included some interesting symmetries in their work. For example, the culminating width of the Gallery at its apex was 3 feet 5 inches while its width at the floor was 6 feet 9 inches. At the exact centre of the floor, running the entire length of the Gallery—and sandwiched between flat-topped masonry ramps each 1 foot 8 inches wide—there was a sunken channel 2 feet deep and 3 feet 5 inches wide.

What could have been the purpose of this slot? And why had it been necessary for it to mirror so precisely the width and form of the ceiling, which also looked like a ‘slot’ sandwiched between the two upper courses of masonry?

I knew that I was not the first person to have stood at the foot of the Grand Gallery and to have been overtaken by the disorienting sense of being ‘in the inside of some enormous instrument of some sort.’25 Who was to say that such intuitions were completely wrong? Or, for that matter, that they were right? No record as to function remained, other than in mystical and symbolic references in certain ancient Egyptian

23 Ibid., p. 93; Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 115.

24 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 93.

25 Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 115.

liturgical texts. These appeared to indicate that the pyramids had been seen as devices designed to turn dead men into immortal beings: to ‘throw open the doors of the firmament and make a road’, so that the deceased pharaoh might ‘ascend into the company of the gods’.26

I had no difficulty accepting that such a belief system might have been at work here, and obviously it could have provided a motive for the whole enterprise. Nevertheless, I was still puzzled why more than six million tons of physical apparatus, intricately interlaced with channels and tubes, corridors and chambers, had been deemed necessary to achieve a mystical, spiritual and symbolic objective.

Being inside the Grand Gallery did feel like being inside an enormous instrument. It had an undeniable aesthetic impact upon me (admittedly a heavy and domineering one), but it was also completely devoid of decorative features and of anything (figures of deities, reliefs of liturgical texts, and so on) which might be suggestive of worship or religion.



The primary impression it conveyed was one of strict functionalism and purposefulness—as though it had been built to do a job. At the same time I was aware of its focused solemnity of style and gravity of manner, which seemed to demand nothing less than serious and complete attention.

By now I had climbed steadily through about half the length of the Gallery. Ahead of me, and behind, shadows and light played tricks amid the looming stone walls. Pausing, I turned my head, looking upwards through the gloom towards the vaulted ceiling which supported the crushing weight of the Great Pyramid of Egypt.

It suddenly hit me how dauntingly and disturbingly old it was, and how completely my life at this moment depended on the skills of the ancient builders. The hefty blocks that spanned the distant ceiling were examples of those skills—every one of them laid at a slightly steeper gradient than that of the Gallery. As the great archaeologist and surveyor Flinders Petrie had observed, this had been done in order that the lower edge of each stone should hitch like a pawl into a ratchet cut into the top of the walls; hence no stone can press on the one below it, so as to cause a cumulative pressure all down the roof; and each stone is separately upheld by the side walls which it lies across.27



26 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 281, Utt. 667A.

27 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 25.

And this was the work of a people whose civilization had only recently emerged from neolithic hunter-gathering?

I began to walk up the Gallery again, using the 2-foot-deep central flooring slot. A modern wooden covering fitted with helpful slats and side railings made the ascent relatively easy. In antiquity, however, the floor had been smoothly polished limestone, which, at a gradient of 26°, must have been almost impossible to climb.

How had it been done? Had it been done at all?

Looming ahead at the end of the Grand Gallery was the dark opening to the King’s Chamber beckoning each and every inquiring pilgrim into the heart of the enigma.


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Chapter 38 - Interactive Three-Dimensional Game


Reaching the top of the Grand Gallery, I clambered over a chunky granite step about three feet high. I remembered that it lay, like the roof of the Queen’s Chamber, exactly along the east-west axis of the Great Pyramid, And therefore marked the point of transition between the northern and southern halves of the monument.1 Somewhat like an altar in appearance, the step also provided a solid horizontal platform immediately in front of the low square tunnel that served as the entrance to the King’s Chamber.



1 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 25.

Pausing for a moment, I looked back down the Gallery, taking in once again its lack of decoration, its lack of religious iconography, and its absolute lack of any of the recognizable symbolism normally associated with the archaic belief system of the Ancient Egyptians. All that registered upon the eye, along the entire 153-foot length of this magnificent geometrical cavity, was its disinterested regularity and its stark machinelike simplicity.

Looking up, I could just make out the opening of a dark aperture, chiselled into the top of the eastern wall above my head. Nobody knew when or by whom this foreboding hole had been cut, or how deep it had originally penetrated. It led to the first of the five relieving chambers above the King’s Chamber and had been extended in 1837 when Howard Vyse had used it to break through to the remaining four.



Looking down again, I could just make out the point at the bottom of the Gallery’s western wall where the near-vertical well-shaft began its precipitous 160 foot descent through the core of the pyramid to join the descending corridor far below ground-level.

Why would such a complicated apparatus of pipes and passageways have been required? At first sight it didn’t make sense. But then nothing about the Great Pyramid did make much sense, unless you were prepared to devote a great deal of attention to it. In unpredictable ways, when you did that, it would from time to time reward you.

If you were sufficiently numerate, for example, as we have seen, it would respond to your basic inquiries into its height and base perimeter by ‘printing out’ the value of pi. And if you were prepared to investigate further, as we shall see, it would download other useful mathematical tidbits, each a little more complex and abstruse that its predecessor.

There was a programmed feel about this whole process, as though it had been carefully prearranged. Not for the first time, I found myself willing to consider the possibility that the pyramid might have been designed as a gigantic challenge or learning machine—or, better still, as an interactive three-dimensional puzzle set down in the desert for humanity to solve.



Antechamber
Just over 3 feet 6 inches high, the entry passage to the lung’s Chamber required all humans of normal stature to stoop. About four feet farther on, however, I reached the ‘Antechamber’, where the roof level rose suddenly to 12 feet above the floor.



The east and west walls of the Antechamber were composed of red granite, into which were cut four opposing pairs of wide parallel slots, assumed by Egyptologists to have held thick portcullis slabs.2 Three of these pairs of slots extended all the way to the floor, and were empty.



2 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 94.



The fourth (the northernmost) had been cut down only as far as the roof level of the entry passage (that is, 3 feet 6 inches above floor level) and still contained a hulking sheet of granite, perhaps nine inches thick and six feet high. There was a horizontal space of only 21 inches between this suspended stone portcullis and the northern end of the entry passage from which I had just emerged.

There was also a gap of a little over 4 feet deep between the top of the portcullis and the ceiling. Whatever function it was designed to serve it was hard to agree with the Egyptologists that this peculiar structure could have been intended to deny access to tomb robbers.

The antechamber.


Genuinely puzzled, I ducked under it and then stood up again in the southern portion of the Antechamber, which was some 10 feet long and maintained the same roof height of 12 feet. Though much worn, the grooves for the three further ‘portcullis’ slabs were still visible in the eastern and western walls. There was no sign of the slabs themselves and, indeed, it was difficult to see how such cumbersome pieces of stone could have been installed in so severely constricted a working space.

I remembered that Flinders Petrie, who had systematically surveyed the entire Giza necropolis in the late nineteenth century, had commented on a similar puzzle in the Second Pyramid:

‘The granite portcullis in the lower passage shows great skill in moving masses, as it would need 40 or 60 men to lift it; yet it has been moved, and raised into place, in a narrow passage, where only a few men could possibly reach it.’3

Exactly the same observations applied to the portcullis slabs of the Great Pyramid. If they were portcullis slabs—gateways capable of being raised and lowered.



3 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 36.

The problem was that the physics of raising and lowering them required they be shorter than the full height of the Antechamber, so that they could be drawn into the roof space to allow the entry and exit of legitimate individuals prior to the closure of the tomb. This meant, of course, that when the bottom edges of the slabs were lowered to the floor to block the Antechamber at that level, an equal and opposite space would have opened up between the top edges of the slabs and the ceiling, through which any enterprising tomb-robber would certainly have been able to climb.

The Antechamber clearly qualified as another of the pyramid’s many thought-provoking paradoxes, in which complexity of structure was combined with apparent pointlessness of function.

An exit tunnel, the same height and width as the entrance tunnel and lined with solid red granite, led off from the Antechamber’s southern wall (also made of granite but incorporating a 12-inch thick limestone layer at its very top). After about a further 9 feet the tunnel debouched into the King’s Chamber, a massive sombre red room made entirely of granite, which radiated an atmosphere of prodigious energy and power.



Stone enigmas
I moved into the centre of the King’s Chamber, the lung axis of which was perfectly oriented east to west while the short axis was equally perfectly oriented north to south. The room was exactly 19 feet 1 inch in height and formed a precise two-by-one rectangle measuring 34 feet 4 inches long by 17 feet 2 inches wide.



With a floor consisting of 15 massive granite paving stones, and walls composed of 100 gigantic granite blocks, each weighing 70 tons or more and laid in five courses, and with a ceiling spanned by nine further granite blocks each weighing approximately 50 tons,4 the effect was of intense and overwhelming compression.


At the Chamber’s western end was the object which, if the Egyptologists were to be believed, the entire Great Pyramid, had been built to house. That object, carved out of one piece of dark chocolatecoloured granite containing peculiarly hard granules of feldspar, quartz and mica, was the lidless coffer presumed to have been the sarcophagus of Khufu.5

Its interior measurements were 6 feet 6.6 inches in length, 2 feet 10.42 inches in depth, and 2 feet 2.81 inches in width. Its exterior measurements were 7 feet 5.62 inches in length, 3 feet 5.31 inches in depth, and 3 feet 2.5 inches in width6 an inch too wide, incidentally, for it to have been carried up through the lower (and now plugged) entrance to the ascending corridor.7



4 The Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 94-5; The Great Pyramid: Your Personal Guide, p. 64.

5 The Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 94-5.

6 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 30.

7 Ibid., p. 95.


Some routine mathematical games were built into the dimensions of the sarcophagus. For example, it had an internal volume of 1166.4 liters and an external volume of exactly twice that, 2332.8 liters.8 Such a precise coincidence could not have been arrived at accidentally: the walls of the coffer had been cut to machine-age tolerances by craftsmen of enormous skill and experience. It seemed, moreover, as Flinders Petrie admitted with some puzzlement after completing his painstaking survey of the Great Pyramid, that these craftsmen had access to tools ‘such as we ourselves have only now reinvented ...’9

Petrie examined the sarcophagus particularly closely and reported that it must have been cut out of its surrounding granite block with straight saws ‘8 feet or more in length’. Since the granite was extremely hard, he could only assume that these saws must have had bronze blades (the hardest metal then supposedly available) inset with ‘cutting points’ made of even harder jewels:

‘The character of the work would certainly seem to point to diamond as being the cutting jewel; and only the considerations of its rarity in general, and its absence from Egypt, interfere with this conclusion ...’10

An even bigger mystery surrounded the hollowing out of the sarcophagus, obviously a far more difficult enterprise than separating it from a block of bedrock. Here Petrie concluded that the Egyptians must have:

adapted their sawing principle into a circular instead of a rectilinear form, curving the blade round into a tube, which drilled out a circular groove by its rotation; thus by breaking away the cores left in such grooves, they were able to hollow out large holes with a minimum of labour. These tubular drills varied from 1/4 inch to 5 inches diameter, and from 1/30 to 1/5 inch thick ...11

Of course, as Petrie admitted, no actual jewelled drills or saws had ever been found by Egyptologists.12 The visible evidence of the kinds of drilling and sawing that had been done, however, compelled him to infer that such instruments must have existed.



He became especially interested in this and extended his study to include not only the King’s Chamber sarcophagus but many other granite artifacts and granite ‘drill cores’ which he collected at Giza. The deeper his research, however, the more puzzling the stone-cutting technology of the Ancient Egyptians became:

The amount of pressure, shown by the rapidity with which the drills and saws pierced through the hard stones, is very surprising; probably a load of at least a ton or two was placed on the 4-inch drills cutting in granite. On the granite core No 7 the spiral of the cut sinks 1 inch in the circumference of 6 inches, a rate of ploughing out which is astonishing ... These rapid spiral grooves cannot be ascribed to anything but the descent of the drill into the granite under enormous pressure ...13

8 Livio Catullo Stecchini in Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 322. Stecchini gives slightly more accurate measures than those of Petrie (quoted) for the internal and external dimensions of the pyramid.

9 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 103.

10 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 74.

11 Ibid., p. 76.
12 Ibid., p. 78.
13 Ibid.

Wasn’t it peculiar that at the supposed dawn of human civilization, more than 4500 years ago, the Ancient Egyptians had acquired what sounded like industrial-age drills packing a ton or more of punch and capable of slicing through hard stones like hot knives through butter?

Petrie could come up with no explanation for this conundrum. Nor was he able to explain the kind of instrument used to cut hieroglyphs into a number of diorite bowls with Fourth Dynasty inscriptions which he found at Giza:

‘The hieroglyphs are incised with a very free-cutting point; they are not scraped or ground out, but are ploughed through the diorite, with rough edges to the line ...’14

This bothered the logical Petrie because he knew that diorite was one of the hardest stones on earth, far harder even than iron.15 Yet here it was in Ancient Egypt being cut with incredible power and precision by some as yet unidentified graving tool:

As the lines are only 1/150 inch wide it is evident that the cutting point must have been much harder than quartz; and tough enough not to splinter when so fine an edge was being employed, probably only 1/200 inch wide. Parallel lines are graved only 1/30 inch apart from centre to centre.16

In other words, he was envisaging an instrument with a needle-sharp point of exceptional, unprecedented hardness capable of penetrating and furrowing diorite with ease, and capable also of withstanding the enormous pressures required throughout the operation. What sort of instrument was that? By what means would the pressure have been applied? How could sufficient accuracy have been maintained to scour parallel lines at intervals of just 1/30-inch?

At least it was possible to conjure a mental picture of the circular drills with jewelled teeth which Petrie supposed must have been used to hollow out the lung’s Chamber sarcophagus. I found, however, that it was not so easy to do the same for the unknown instrument capable of incising hieroglyphs into diorite at 2500 BC, at any rate not without assuming the existence of a far higher level of technology than Egyptologists were prepared to consider.

Nor was it just a few hieroglyphs or a few diorite bowls. During my travels in Egypt I had examined many stone vessels—dating back in some cases to pre-dynastic times—that had been mysteriously hollowed out of a range of materials such as diorite, basalt, quartz crystal and metamorphic schist.17

For example, more than 30,000 such vessels had been found in the chambers beneath the Third Dynasty Step Pyramid of Zoser at Saqqara.18 That meant that they were at least as old as Zoser himself (i.e. around 2650 BC19). Theoretically, they could have been even older than that, because identical vessels had been found in pre-dynastic strata dated to 4000 BC and earlier,20 and because the practice of handing down treasured heirlooms from generation to generation had been deeply ingrained in Egypt since time immemorial.

Whether they were made in 2500 BC or in 4000 BC or even earlier, the stone vessels from the Step Pyramid were remarkable for their workmanship, which once again seemed to have been accomplished by some as yet unimagined (and, indeed, almost unimaginable) tool.

Why unimaginable? Because many of the vessels were tall vases with long, thin, elegant necks and widely flared interiors, often incorporating fully hollowed-out shoulders. No instrument yet invented was capable of carving vases into shapes like these, because such an instrument would have had to have been narrow enough to have passed through the necks and strong enough (and of the right shape) to have scoured out the shoulders and the rounded interiors. And how could sufficient upward and outward pressure have been generated and applied within the vases to achieve these effects?

The tall vases were by no means the only enigmatic vessels unearthed from the Pyramid of Zoser, and from a number of other archaic sites. There were monolithic urns with delicate ornamental handles left attached to their exteriors by the carvers. There were bowls, again with extremely narrow necks like the vases, and with widely flared, pot-bellied interiors. There were also open bowls, and almost microscopic vials, and occasional strange wheel-shaped objects cut out of metamorphic schist with inwardly curled edges planed down so fine that they were almost translucent.21



14 Ibid., pp. 74-5.
15 The Pyramids: An Enigma Solved, p. 8.

16 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 75.

17 The Pyramids: An Enigma Solved, p. 118.

18 Egypt: Land of the Pharaohs, Time-Life Books, 1992, p. 51.

19 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.

20 For example, see Cyril Aldred, Egypt to the End of the Old Kingdom, Thames & Hudson, London, 1988, p. 25.

21 Ibid., p. 57. The relevant artefacts are in the Cairo Museum.



In all cases what was really perplexing was the precision with which the interiors and exteriors of these vessels had been made to correspond—curve matching curve—over absolutely smooth, polished surfaces with no tool marks visible.

There was no technology known to have been available to the Ancient Egyptians capable of achieving such results. Nor, for that matter, would any stone-carver today be able to match them, even if he were working with the best tungsten-carbide tools. The implication, therefore, is that an unknown or secret technology had been put to use in Ancient Egypt.



Ceremony of the sarcophagus
Standing in the King’s Chamber, facing west—the direction of death amongst both the Ancient Egyptians and the Maya—I rested my hands lightly on the gnarled granite edge of the sarcophagus which Egyptologists insist had been built to house the body of Khufu. I gazed into its murky depths where the dim electric lighting of the chamber seemed hardly to penetrate and saw specks of dust swirling in a golden cloud.

It was just a trick of light and shadow, of course, but the King’s Chamber was full of such illusions. I remembered that Napoleon Bonaparte had paused to spend a night alone here during his conquest of Egypt in the late eighteenth century. The next morning he had emerged pale and shaken, having experienced something which had profoundly disturbed him but about which he never afterwards spoke.22



22 Reported in P. W. Roberts, River in the Desert: Modern Travels in Ancient Egypt, Random House, New York and Toronto, 1993, p. 115.

Had he tried to sleep in the sarcophagus?

Acting on impulse, I climbed into the granite coffer and lay down, face upwards, my feet pointed towards the south and my head to the north.

Napoleon was a little guy, so he must have fitted comfortably. There was plenty of room for me too. But had Khufu been here as well?

I relaxed and tried not to worry about the possibility of one of the pyramid guards coming in and finding me in this embarrassing and probably illegal position. Hoping that I would remain undisturbed for a few minutes, I folded my hands across my chest and gave voice to a sustained low-pitched tone—something I had tried out several times before at other points in the King’s Chamber. On those occasions, in the centre of the floor, I had noticed that the walls and ceiling seemed to collect the sound, to gather and to amplify it and project it back at me so that I could sense the returning vibrations through my feet and scalp and skin.

Now in the sarcophagus I was aware of very much the same effect, although seemingly amplified and concentrated many times over. It was like being in the sound-box of some giant, resonant musical instrument designed to emit for ever just one reverberating note. The sound was intense and quite disturbing. I imagined it rising out of the coffer and bouncing off the red granite walls and ceiling of the King’s Chamber, shooting up through the northern and southern ‘ventilation’ shafts and spreading across the Giza plateau like a sonic mushroom cloud.

With this ambitious vision in my mind, and with the sound of my low-pitched note echoing in my ears and causing the sarcophagus to vibrate around me, I closed my eyes. When I opened them a few minutes later it was to behold a distressing sight: six Japanese tourists of mixed ages and sexes had congregated around the sarcophagus—two of them standing to the east, two to the west and one each to the north and south.

They all looked ... amazed. And I was amazed to see them. Because of recent attacks by armed Islamic extremists there were now almost no tourists at Giza and I had expected to have the King’s Chamber to myself.

What does one do in a situation like this?

Gathering as much dignity as I could muster, I stood upright, smiling and dusting myself off. The Japanese stepped back and I climbed out of the sarcophagus. Cultivating a businesslike manner, as though I did things like this all the time, I strolled to the point two-thirds of the way along the northern wall of the King’s Chamber where the entrance to what Egyptologists refer to as the ‘northern ventilation shaft’ is located, and began to examine it minutely.

Some 8 inches wide by 9 inches high, it was, I knew, more than 200 feet in length and emerged into open air at the pyramid’s 103rd course of masonry. Presumably by design rather than by accident, it pointed to the circumpolar regions of the northern heavens at an angle of 32° 30’. This, in the Pyramid Age around 2500 BC, would have meant that it was directed on the upper culmination of Alpha Draconis, a prominent star in the constellation of Draco.23

Much to my relief the Japanese rapidly completed their tour of the King’s Chamber and left, stooping, without a backward glance. As soon as they had gone I crossed over to the other side of the room to take a look at the southern shaft. Since I had last been here some months before, its appearance had changed horribly. Its mouth now contained a massive electrical air-conditioning unit installed by Rudolf Gantenbrink, who even now was turning his attentions to the neglected shafts of the Queen’s Chamber.

Since Egyptologists were satisfied that the King’s Chamber shafts had been built for ventilation purposes, they saw nothing untoward in using modern technology to improve the efficiency of this task. Yet wouldn’t horizontal shafts have been more effective than sloping ones if their primary purpose had been ventilation, and easier to build?24 It was therefore unlikely to be an accident that the southern shaft of the King’s Chamber targeted the southern heavens at 45°.



During the Pyramid Age this was the location for the meridian transit of Zeta Orionis, the lowest of the three stars of Orion’s Belt25—an alignment, I was to discover in due course, that would turn out to be of the utmost significance for future pyramid research.



23 Robert Bauval, Discussions in Egyptology No. 29, 1994.

24 Ibid.
25 Ibid. See also The Orion Mystery, p. 172.



The game-master
Now that I had the Chamber to myself again, I walked over to the western wall, on the far side of the sarcophagus, and turned to face east.

The huge room had an endless capacity to generate indications of mathematical game-playing. For example, its height (19 feet 1 inch) was exactly half of the length of its floor diagonal (38 feet 2 inches).26 Moreover, since the King’s Chamber formed a perfect 1 x 2 rectangle, was it conceivable that the pyramid builders were unaware that they had also made it express and exemplify the ‘golden section’?

Known as phi, the golden section was another irrational number like pi that could not be worked out arithmetically. Its value was the square root of 5 plus 1 divided by 2, equivalent to 1.61803.27 This proved to be the ‘limiting value of the ratio between successive numbers in the Fibonacci series—the series of numbers beginning 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13—in which each term is the sum of the two previous terms.’28

Phi could also be obtained schematically by dividing a line A-B at a point C in such a way that the whole line A-B was longer than the first part, A-C, in the same proportion as the first part, A-C, was longer than the remainder, C-B.29 This proportion, which had been proven particularly harmonious and agreeable to the eye, had supposedly been first discovered by the Pythagorean Greeks, who incorporated it into the Parthenon at Athens. There is absolutely no doubt, however, that phi illustrated and obtained at least 2000 years previously in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid at Giza.

26 Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 117; The Great Pyramid: Your Personal Guide, p. 64.
27 John Ivimy, The Sphinx and the Megaliths, Abacus, London, 1976, p. 118.

28 Ibid.
29 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 191.

At the very beginning of its Dynastic history, Egypt inherited a system of measures from unknown predecessors. Expressed in these ancient measures, the floor dimensions of the King’s Chamber (34 ft. 4” x 17 ft. 2”) work out at exactly 20 x 10 royal cubits’, while the height of the side walls to the ceiling is exactly 11.18 royal cubits. The semi-diagonal of the floor (A-B) is also exactly 11.18 royal cubits and can be ‘swung up’ to C to confirm the height of the chamber. Phi is defined mathematically as the square root of 5 + 1 + 2, i.e. 1.618. Is it a coincidence that the distance C-D (i.e. the wall height of the King’s Chamber plus half the width of its floor) equals 16.18 royal cubits, thus incorporating the essential digits of phi?

To understand how it is necessary to envisage the rectangular floor of the chamber as being divided into two imaginary squares of equal size, with the side length of each square being given a value of 1.



If either of these two squares were then split in half, thus forming two new rectangles, and if the diagonal of the rectangle nearest to the centerline of the King’s Chamber were swung down to the base, the point where its tip touched the base would be phi, or 1.618, in relation to the side length (i.e., 1) of the original square.30



(An alternative way of obtaining phi, also built into the King’s Chamber’s dimensions, is illustrated on the previous page.)



30 Ibid. See also Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, pp. 117-19.

The Egyptologists considered all this was pure chance. Yet the pyramid builders had done nothing by chance. Whoever they had been, I found it hard to imagine more systematic and mathematically minded people.

I’d had quite enough of their mathematical games for one day. As I left the King’s Chamber, however, I could not forget that it was located in line with the 50th course of the Great Pyramid’s masonry at a height of almost 150 feet above the ground.31



This meant, as Flinders Petrie pointed out with some astonishment, that the builders had managed to place it ‘at the level where the vertical section of the Pyramid was halved, where the area of the horizontal section was half that of the base, where the diagonal from corner to corner was equal to the length of the base, and where the width of the face was equal to half the diagonal of the base’.32



31 The Great Pyramid: Your Personal Guide, p. 64.

32 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 93.

Confidently and efficiently fooling around with more than six million tons of stone, creating galleries and chambers and shafts and corridors more or less at will, achieving near-perfect symmetry, near-perfect right angles, and near-perfect alignments to the cardinal points, the mysterious builders of the Great Pyramid had found the time to play a great many other tricks as well with the dimensions of the vast monument.

Why did their minds work this way? What had they been trying to say or do? And why, so many thousands of years after it was built, did the monument still exert a magnetic influence upon so many people, from so many different walks of life, who came into contact with it?

There was a Sphinx in the neighbourhood, so I decided that I would put these riddles to It ...



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Chapter 39 - Place of the Beginning
Giza, Egypt, 16 March 1993, 3:30 p.m.

It was mid afternoon by the time I left the Great Pyramid. Retracing the route that Santha and I had followed the night before when we had climbed the monument, I walked eastwards along the northern face, southwards along the flank of the eastern face, clambered over mounds of rubble and ancient tombs that clustered closely in this part of the necropolis, and came out on to the sand-covered limestone bedrock of the Giza plateau, which sloped down towards the south and east.

At the bottom of this long gentle slope, about half a kilometre from the south-eastern corner of the Great Pyramid, the Sphinx crouched in his rock-hewn pit. Sixty-six feet high and more than 240 feet long, with a head measuring 13 feet 8 inches wide,1 he was, by a considerable margin, the largest single piece of sculpture in the world—and the most renowned:

A shape with lion body and the head of a man

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.2

Approaching the monument from the north-west I crossed the ancient causeway that connected the Second Pyramid with the so-called Valley Temple of Khafre, a most unusual structure located just 50 feet south of the Sphinx itself on the eastern edge of the Giza necropolis.

This Temple had long been believed to be far older than the time of Khafre. Indeed throughout much of the nineteenth century the consensus among scholars was that it had been built in remote prehistory, and had nothing to do with the architecture of dynastic Egypt.3 What changed all that was the discovery, buried within the Temple precincts, of a number of inscribed statues of Khafre.



Most were pretty badly smashed, but one, found upside down in a deep pit in an antechamber, was almost intact. Life-sized, and exquisitely carved out of black, jewel-hard diorite, it showed the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh seated on his throne and gazing with serene indifference towards infinity.



1 Measurements from The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 106.

2 W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’.
3 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 48.

At this point the razor-sharp reasoning of Egyptology was brought to bear, and a solution of almost awe-inspiring brilliance was worked out: statues of Khafre had been found in the Valley Temple therefore the Valley Temple had been built by Khafre. The normally sensible Flinders Petrie summed up: ‘The fact that the only dateable remains found in the Temple were statues of Khafre shows that it is of his period; since the idea of his appropriating an earlier building is very unlikely.’4

But why was the idea so unlikely?

Throughout the history of Dynastic Egypt many pharaohs appropriated the buildings of their predecessors, sometimes deliberately striking out the cartouches of the original builders and replacing them with their own.5 There was no good reason to assume that Khafre would have been deterred from linking himself to the Valley Temple, particularly if it had not been associated in his mind with any previous historical ruler but with the great ‘gods’ said by the Ancient Egyptians to have brought civilization to the Nile Valley in the distant and mythical epoch they spoke of as the First Time.6



In such a place of archaic and mysterious power, which he does not appear to have interfered with in any other way, Khafre might have thought that the setting up of beautiful and lifelike statues of himself could bring eternal benefits. And if, among the gods, the Valley Temple had been associated with Osiris (whom it was every pharaoh’s objective to join in the afterlife),7 Khafre’s use of statues to forge a strong symbolic link would be even more understandable.



4 Ibid., p. 50.
5 Margaret A. Murray, The Splendour that was Egypt, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1987, pp. 160-1.

6 See Part VII, for a full discussion of the ‘First Time’.

7 Discussed in Part VII; see also Part III for a comparison of the Osirian rebirth cult and of the rebirth beliefs of Ancient Mexico.



Temple of the giants
After crossing the causeway, the route I had chosen to reach the Valley Temple took me through the rubble of a ‘mastaba’ field, where lesser notables of the Fourth Dynasty had been buried in subterranean tombs under bench-shaped platforms of stone (mastaba is a modern Arabic word meaning bench, hence the name given to these tombs).



I walked along the southern wall of the Temple itself, recalling that this ancient building was almost as perfectly oriented north to south as was the Great Pyramid (with an error of just 12 arc minutes).8

The Temple was square in plan, 147 feet along each side. It was built in to the slope of the plateau, which was higher in the west than in the east. In consequence, while its western wall stood only a little over 20 feet tall, its eastern wall exceeded 40 feet.9



8 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 47.
9 Measurements from The Pyramids and Temples of Egypt, p. 48, and The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 108.

Viewed from the south, the impression was of a wedge-shaped structure, squat and powerful, resting firmly on bedrock. A closer examination revealed that it incorporated several characteristics quite alien and inexplicable to the modern eye, which that must have seemed almost as alien and inexplicable to the Ancient Egyptians. For a start, there was the stark absence, both inside and out, of inscriptions and other identifying marks.



In this respect, as the reader will appreciate, the Valley Temple could be compared with a few of the other anonymous and frankly undatable monuments on the Giza plateau, including the great pyramids (and also with a mysterious structure at Abydos known as the Osireion, which we consider in detail in a later chapter) but otherwise bore no resemblance to the typical and well-known products of Ancient Egyptian art and architecture—all copiously decorated, embellished and inscribed.10

Another important and unusual feature of the Valley Temple was that its core structure was built entirely, entirely, of gigantic limestone megaliths. The majority of these measured about 18 feet long x 10 feet wide x 8 feet high and some were as large as 30 feet long x 12 feet wide x 10 feet high.11 Routinely exceeding 200 tons in weight, each was heavier than a modern diesel locomotive—and there were hundreds of blocks.12



10 In addition to the three Giza pyramids, the Mortuary Temples of Khafre and Menkaure can be compared with the Valley Temple in terms of their absence of adornment and use of megaliths weighing 200 tons or more.

11 Serpent in the Sky, p. 211; also Mystery of the Sphinx, NBC-TV, 1993.
12 For block weights see The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 215; Serpent in the Sky, p. 242; The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 144; The Pyramids: An Enigma Solved, p. 51; Mystery of the Sphinx, NBC-TV, 1993.

Was this in any way mysterious?

Egyptologists did not seem to think so; indeed few of them had bothered to comment, except in the most superficial manner—either on the staggering size of these blocks or the mind-bending logistics of how they might have been put in place. As we have seen, monoliths of up to 70 tons, each about as heavy as 100 family-sized cars, had been lifted to the level of the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid—again without provoking much comment from the Egyptological fraternity—so the lack of curiosity about the Valley Temple was perhaps no surprise.



Nevertheless, the block size was truly extraordinary, seeming to belong not just to another epoch but to another ethic altogether—one that reflected incomprehensible aesthetic and structural concerns and suggested a scale of priorities utterly different from our own.

Why, for example, insist on using these cumbersome 200-ton monoliths when you could simply slice each of them up into 10 or 20 or 40 or 80 smaller and more manoeuvrable blocks?

Why make things so difficult for yourself when you could achieve much the same visual effect with much less effort?

And how had the builders of the Valley Temple lifted these colossal megaliths to heights of more than 40 feet?

At present there are only two land-based cranes in the world that could lift weights of this magnitude. At the very frontiers of construction technology, these are both vast, industrialized machines, with booms reaching more than 220 feet into the air, which require on-board counterweights of 160 tons to prevent them from tipping over. The preparation-time for a single lift is around six weeks and calls for the skills of specialized teams of up to 20 men.13



13 Personal communication from John Anthony West. See also Mystery of the Sphinx, NBC-TV.

In other words, modern builders with all the advantages of high-tech engineering at their disposal, can barely hoist weights of 200 tons. Was it not, therefore, somewhat surprising that the builders at Giza had hoisted such weights on an almost routine basis?

Moving closer to the Temple’s looming southern wall I observed something else about the huge limestone blocks: not only were they ridiculously large but, as though to complicate still further an almost impossible task, they had been cut and fitted into multi-angled jigsaw-puzzle patterns similar to those employed in the cyclopean stone structures at Sacsayhuaman and Machu Picchu in Peru (see Part II).

Another point I noticed was that the Temple walls appeared to have been constructed in two stages. The first stage, most of which was intact (though deeply eroded), consisted of the strong and heavy core of 200ton limestone blocks. On to both sides of these had been grafted a façade of dressed granite which (as we shall see) was largely intact in the interior of the building but had mainly fallen away on the outside. A closer look at some of the remaining exterior facing blocks where they had become detached from the core revealed a curious fact.

When they had been placed here in antiquity the backs of these blocks had been cut to fit into and around the deep coves and scallops of existing weathering patterns on the limestone core. The presence of those patterns seemed to imply that the core blocks must have stood here, exposed to the elements, for an immense span of time before they had been faced with granite.

The Sphinx and the Sphinx Temple with the Valley Temple of Khafre.




Lord of Rostau
I now moved around to the entrance of the Valley Temple, located near the northern end of the 43-foot high eastern wall. Here I saw that the granite facing was still in perfect condition, consisting of huge slabs weighing between 70 and 80 tons apiece which protected the underlying limestone core blocks like a suit of armour.



Incorporating a tall, narrow, roofless corridor, this dark and imposing portal ran east to west at first, then made a right-angle turn to the south, leading me into a spacious antechamber. It was here that the life-size diorite statue of Khafre had been found, upside down and apparently ritually buried, at the bottom of a deep pit.

Lining the entire interior of the antechamber was a majestic jigsaw puzzle of smoothly polished granite facing blocks (which continued through the whole building). Exactly like the blocks on some of the bigger and more bizarre pre-Inca monuments in Peru, these incorporated multiple, finely chiselled angles in the joints and presented a complex overall pattern. Of particular note was the way certain blocks wrapped around corners and were received by re-entering angles cut into other blocks.

From the antechamber I passed through an elegant corridor which led west into a spacious T-shaped hall. I found myself standing at the head of the T looking further westwards along an imposing avenue of monolithic columns. Reaching almost 15 feet in height and measuring 41 inches on each side, all these columns supported granite beams, which were again 41 inches square. A row of six further columns, also supporting beams, ran along the north-south axis of the T; the overall effect was of massive but refined simplicity.

What was this building for? According to the Egyptologists who attributed it to Khafre its purpose was obvious. It had been designed, they said, as a venue for certain of the purification and rebirth rituals required for the funeral of the pharaoh. The Ancient Egyptians themselves, however, had left no inscriptions confirming this.

On the contrary, the only written evidence that has come down to us indicated that the Valley Temple could not (originally at any rate) have had anything to do with Khafre, for the simple reason that it was built before his reign. This written evidence is the Inventory Stela, (referred to in Chapter Thirty-five), which also indicated a much greater age for the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx.

Part VII

Lord of Eternity
Egypt 2



Chapter 40 - Are There Any Secrets Left in Egypt?


During the early evening of 26 November 1922 the British archaeologist Howard Carter, together with his sponsor Lord Carnarvon, entered the tomb of a youthful pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty who had ruled Egypt from 1352-43 BC. The name of that pharaoh, which has since resounded around the world, was Tutankhamun.

Two nights later, on 28 November, the tomb’s ‘Treasury’ was breached. It was filled with a huge golden shrine and gave access to another chamber beyond. Rather unusually, this chamber, although heaped with a dazzling array of precious and beautiful artifacts, had no door: its entrance was watched over by an extraordinarily lifelike effigy of the jackal-headed mortuary god Anubis. With ears erect, the god crouched doglike, forepaws stretched out, on the lid of a gilded wooden casket perhaps four feet long, three feet high and two feet wide.

The Egyptian Museum, Cairo, December 1993
Still perched astride his casket, but now locked away in a dusty glass display case, Anubis held my attention for a long, quiet moment.



His effigy had been carved out of stuccoed wood, entirely covered with black resin, then painstakingly inlaid with gold, alabaster, calcite, obsidian and silver—materials used to particular effect in the eyes, which glittered watchfully with an unsettling sense of fierce and focused intelligence. At the same time his finely etched ribs and lithe musculature gave off an aura of understated strength, energy and grace.

Captured by the force field of this occult and powerful presence, I was vividly reminded of the universal myths of precession I had been studying during the past year. Canine figures moved back and forth among these myths in a manner which at times had seemed almost plotted in the literary sense. I had begun to wonder whether the symbolism of dogs, wolves, jackals, and so on, might have been deliberately employed by the long-dead myth-makers to guide initiates through a maze of clues to secret reservoirs of lost scientific knowledge.

Among these reservoirs, I suspected, was the myth of Osiris. Much more than a myth, it had been dramatized and performed each year in Ancient Egypt in the form of a mystery play—a ‘plotted’ literary artifact, passed down as a treasured tradition since prehistoric times.1 This tradition, as we saw in Part V, contained values for the rate of precessional motion that were so accurate and so consistent it was extremely difficult to attribute them to chance.

1 See, for example, Rosalie David, A Guide to Religious Ritual at Abydos, Aris and Phillips, Warminster, 1981, in particular p. 121.

Nor did it seem likely to be an accident that the jackal god had been assigned a role centre-stage in the drama, serving as the spirit guide of Osiris on his journey through the underworld.2 It was tempting, too, to wonder whether there was any significance in the fact that in ancient times Anubis had been referred to by Egyptian priests as the ‘guardian of the secret and sacred writings’.3



Under the grooved edge of the gilded casket on which his effigy now crouched was found an inscription: ‘initiated into the secrets’.4 Alternative translations of the same hieroglyphic text rendered it variously as ‘he who is upon the secrets’, and as ‘guardian of the secrets’.5

2 The Gods of the Egyptians, volume II, pp. 262-6.

3 Lucy Lamy, Egyptian Mysteries, Thames & Hudson, London, 1986, p. 93.
4 Jean-Pierre Corteggiani, The Egypt of the Pharaohs at the Cairo Museum, Scala Publications, London, 1987, p. 118.
5 Ibid.; see also R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, Sacred Science: The King of Pharaonic Theocracy, Inner Traditions International, Rochester, 1988, pp. 182-3.

But were there any secrets left in Egypt?

After more than a century of intensive archaeological investigations, could the sands of this antique land yield any further surprises?


Bauval’s Stars and West’s Stones
In 1993 there was an astonishing new discovery which suggested that there was much still to learn about Ancient Egypt. The discoverer, moreover, was not some astigmatic archaeologist sieving his way through the dust of ages but an outsider to the field: Robert Bauval, a Belgian construction engineer with a flair for astronomy who observed a correlation in the sky that the experts had missed in their fixation with the ground at their feet.

What Bauval saw was this: as the three belt stars of the Orion constellation crossed the meridian at Giza they lay in a not quite straight line high in the southern heavens. The lower two stars, Al Nitak and Al Nilam, formed a perfect diagonal but the third star, Mintaka, appeared to be offset to the observer’s left, that is, towards the east.

The three pyramids of Giza plotted against the three belt stars of the Orion constellation.


Curiously enough (as we saw in Chapter Thirty-six), this was exactly the site-plan of the three enigmatic pyramids of the Giza plateau. Bauval realized that an aerial view of the Giza necropolis would show the Great Pyramid of Khufu occupying the position of Al Nitak, and the Second Pyramid of Khafre occupying the position of Al Nilam, while the Third Pyramid of Menkaure was offset to the east of the diagonal formed by the other two—thus completing what seemed at first to be a vast diagram of the stars.

Was this indeed what the Giza pyramids represented? I knew that Bauval’s later work, which had been wholeheartedly endorsed by mathematicians and astronomers, had borne out his inspired hunch. His evidence (reviewed fully in Chapter Forty-nine) showed that the three pyramids were an unbelievably precise terrestrial map of the three stars of Orion’s belt, accurately reflecting the angles between each of them and even (by means of their respective sizes) providing some indication of their individual magnitudes.6



Moreover, this map extended outwards to the north and south to encompass several other structures on the Giza plateau—once again with faultless precision.7



However, the real surprise revealed by Bauval’s astronomical calculations was this: despite the fact that some aspects of the Great Pyramid did relate astronomically to the Pyramid Age, the Giza monuments as a whole were so arranged as to provide a picture of the skies (which alter their appearance down the ages as a result of precession of the equinoxes) not as they had looked in the Fourth Dynasty around 2500 BC, but as they had looked—and only as they had looked—around the year 10,450 BC.8

I had come to Egypt to go over the Giza site with Robert Bauval and to question him about his star-correlation theory. In addition I wanted to canvass his views on what sort of human society, if any, could have had the technological know-how, such a very long while ago, to measure accurately the altitudes of the stars and to devise a plan as mathematical and ambitious as that of the Giza necropolis.

I had also come to meet another researcher who had challenged the orthodox chronology of Ancient Egypt with a well-founded claim to have found hard evidence of a high civilization in the Nile Valley in 10,000 BC or earlier. Like Bauval’s astronomical data, the evidence had always been available but had failed to attract the attention of established Egyptologists.



The man responsible for bringing it before the public now was the American scholar, John Anthony West, who argued that the specialists had missed it—not because they had failed to find it, but because they had found it and had failed to interpret it properly.9

West’s evidence focused on certain key structures, notably the Great Sphinx and the Valley Temple at Giza and, much farther south, the mysterious Osireion at Abydos. He argued that these desert monuments showed many scientifically unmistakable signs of having been weathered by water, an erosive agent they could only have been exposed to in sufficient quantities during the damp ‘pluvial’ period that accompanied the end of the last Ice Age around the eleventh millennium BC.10


6 The Orion Mystery.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Serpent in the Sky, pp. 184-242.

10 Ibid., 186-7.

The implication of this peculiar and extremely distinctive pattern of ‘precipitation induced’ weathering, was that the Osireion, the Sphinx, and other associated structures were built before 10,000 BC.11 A British investigative journalist summed up the effect: West is really an academic’s worst nightmare, because here comes somebody way out of left-field with a thoroughly well thought out, well presented, coherently described theory, full of data they can’t refute, and it pulls the rug out from beneath their feet. So how do they deal with it? They ignore it. They hope it’ll go away ... and it won’t go away.12

The reason the new theory would not, under any circumstances, go away, despite its rejection by droves of ‘competent Egyptologists’, was that it had won widespread support from another scientific branch of scholarship—geology. Dr Robert Schoch, a professor of Geology at Boston University, had played a prominent role in validating West’s estimates concerning the true age of the Sphinx, and his views had been endorsed by almost 300 of his peers at the 1992 annual convention of the Geological Society of America.13

Since then, most often out of the public eye, an acrimonious dispute had begun to smoulder between the geologists and the Egyptologists.14 And though very few people other than John West were prepared to say as much, what was at stake in this dispute was a complete upheaval in accepted views about the evolution of human civilization.

According to West:

We are told that the evolution of human civilization is a linear process—that it goes from stupid cavemen to smart old us with our hydrogen bombs and striped toothpaste. But the proof that the Sphinx is many, many thousands of years older than the archaeologists think it is, that it preceded by many thousands of years even dynastic Egypt, means that there must have been, at some distant point in history, a high and sophisticated civilization—just as all the legends affirm.15

My own travels and research during the preceding four years had opened my eyes to the electrifying possibility that those legends could be true, and this was why I had come back to Egypt to meet West and Bauval. I was struck by the way in which their hitherto disparate lines of enquiry16 had converged so convincingly on what appeared to be the astronomical and geological fingerprints of a lost civilization, one that might or might not have originated in the Nile Valley but that seemed to have had a presence here as far back as the eleventh millennium BC.

11 Ibid.
12 Mystery of the Sphinx, NBC-TV, 1993.

13 Conde Nast Traveller, February 1993, p. 176.
14 E.g, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Chicago, 1992, Debate: How Old is the Sphinx?
15 Mystery of the Sphinx.
16 John West and Robert Bauval worked in isolation, unaware of each other’s findings, until I introduced them.



The way of the jackal
Anubis, guardian of the secrets, god of the funerary chamber, jackal-headed opener of the ways of the dead, guide and companion of Osiris ...

It was around five o’clock in the afternoon, closing-time at the Cairo Museum, when Santha pronounced herself satisfied with her photographs of the sinister black effigy. Down below us guards were whistling and clapping their hands as they sought to herd the last few sightseers out of the halls, but up on the second floor of the hundred-year-old building, where ancient Anubis crouched in his millennial watchfulness, all was quiet, all was still.

We left the sombre museum and walked down into the sunlight still bathing Cairo’s bustling Tahrir Square.

Anubis, I reflected, had shared his duties as spirit guide and guardian of the secret writings with another god whose type and symbol had also been the jackal and whose name, Upuaut, literally meant Opener of the Ways.17



Both these canine deities had been linked since time immemorial with the ancient town of Abydos in upper Egypt, the original god of which, Khenti-Amentiu (the strangely named ‘Foremost of the Westerners’) had also been represented as a member of the dog family, usually lying recumbent on a black standard.18



17 The Gods of the Egyptians, volume II, p. 264.
18 Blue Guide, Egypt, p. 509; see also From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, pp. 211-15; Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 31ff; The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 197.

Was there any significance in the repeated recurrence at Abydos of all this mythical and symbolic doggishness, with its promise of high secrets waiting to unfold? It seemed worthwhile trying to find out since the extensive ruins there included the structure known as the Osireion, which West’s geological research had indicated might be far older than the archaeologists thought

Besides, I had already arranged to meet West in a few days in the upper Egyptian town of Luxor, less than 200 kilometers south of Abydos. Rather than flying directly to Luxor from Cairo, as I had originally planned, I now realized that it would be perfectly feasible to go by road and to visit Abydos and a number of other sites along the way.

Our driver, Mohamed Walili, was waiting for us in an underground carpark just off Tahrir Square. A large genial, elderly man, he owned a battered white Peugeot taxi normally to be found standing in the rank outside the Mena House hotel at Giza. Over the last few years, on our frequent research trips to Cairo, we had struck up a friendship with him and he now worked with us whenever we were in Egypt.



We haggled for some time about the appropriate daily rate for the long return journey to Abydos and Luxor. Many matters had to be taken into account, including the fact that some of the areas we would be passing through had recently been targets of terrorist attacks by Islamic militants. Eventually we agreed on a price and arranged to set off early the following morning.


Back to Contents





Chapter 41 - City of the Sun, Chamber of the Jackal


Mohamed picked us up at our hotel in Heliopolis at 6 a. m. when it was still half dark.

We drank small cups of thick black coffee at a roadside stall and then drove west, along dusty streets still almost deserted, towards the River Nile. I had asked Mohamed to take us through Maydan al-Massallah Square, which was dominated by one of the world’s oldest intact Egyptian obelisks.1 Weighing an estimated 350 tons, this was a pink granite monolith, 107 feet high, erected by Pharaoh Senuseret I (1971-1928 BC).



It had originally been one of a pair at the gateway of the great Heliopolitan Temple of the Sun. In the 4000 years since then the temple itself had entirely vanished, as had the second obelisk. Indeed, almost all of ancient Heliopolis had now been obliterated, cannibalized for its handsome dressed stones and ready-made building materials by countless generations of the citizens of Cairo.2

Heliopolis (City of the Sun) was referred to in the Bible as On but was originally known in the Egyptian language as Innu, or Innu Mehret— meaning ‘the pillar’ or ‘the northern pillar’.3 It was a district of immense sanctity, associated with a strange group of nine solar and stellar deities, and was old beyond reckoning when Senuseret chose it as the site for his obelisk. Indeed, together with Giza (and the distant southern city of Abydos) Innu/Heliopolis was believed to have been part of the first land that emerged from the primeval waters at the moment of creation, the land of the ‘First Time’, where the gods had commenced their rule on earth.4


1 ‘Saqqara, Egypt: Archaeologists have discovered a green limestone obelisk, the world’s oldest-known complete obelisk, dedicated to Inty, a wife of Pharaoh Pepi I, Egypt’s ruler almost 4300 years ago, who was regarded as a goddess after her death.’ Times, London, 9 May 1992; see also Daily Telegraph, London, 9 May 1992.
2 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, pp. 173-4; Rosalie and Anthony E. David, A Biographical Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, Seaby, London, 1992, pp. 133-4; Blue Guide, Egypt, p. 413.

3 The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 110.

4 George Hart, Egyptian Myths, British Museum Publications, 1990, p. 11.
5 The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 110; Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 66;


Heliopolitan theology rested on a creation-myth distinguished by a number of unique and curious features. It taught that in the beginning the universe had been filled with a dark, watery nothingness, called the Nun. Out of this inert cosmic ocean (described as ‘shapeless, black with the blackness of the blackest night’) rose a mound of dry land on which Ra, the Sun God, materialized in his self-created form as Atum (sometimes depicted as an old bearded man leaning on a staff):5

The sky had not been created, the earth had not been created, the children of the earth and the reptiles had not been fashioned in that place ... I, Atum, was one by myself ... There existed no other who worked with me ...6

Conscious of being alone, this blessed and immortal being contrived to create two divine offspring, Shu, god of the air and dryness, and Tefnut the goddess of moisture:

‘I thrust my phallus into my closed hand. I made my seed to enter my hand. I poured it into my own mouth. I evacuated under the form of Shu, I passed water under the form of Tefnut.’7

Despite such apparently inauspicious beginnings, Shu and Tefnut (who were always described as ‘Twins’ and frequently depicted as lions) grew to maturity, copulated and produced offspring of their own: Geb the god of the earth and Nut, the goddess of the sky. These two also mated, creating Osiris and Isis, Set and Nepthys, and so completed the Ennead, the full company of the Nine Gods of Heliopolis. Of the nine, Ra, Shu, Geb and Osiris were said to have ruled in Egypt as kings, followed by Horus, and lastly—for 3226 years—by the Ibis-headed wisdom god Thoth.8

Who were these people—or creatures, or beings, or gods?

Were they figments of the priestly imagination, or symbols, or ciphers?

Were the stories told about them vivid myth memories of real events which had taken place thousands of years previously?

Or were they, perhaps, part of a coded message from the ancients that had been transmitting itself over and over again down the epochs—a message only now beginning to be unravelled and understood?

Such notions seemed fanciful. Nevertheless I could hardly forget that out of this very same Heliopolitan tradition the great myth of Isis and Osiris had flowed, covertly transmitting an accurate calculus for the rate of precessional motion.



Moreover the priests of Innu, whose responsibility it had been to guard and nurture such traditions, had been renowned throughout Egypt for their high wisdom and their proficiency in prophecy, astronomy, mathematics, architecture and the magic arts. They were also famous for their possession of a powerful and sacred object known as the Benben.9


5 From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 140.
6 Papyrus of Nesiamsu, cited in Sacred Science: The King of Pharaonic Theocracy, pp. 188-9; see also From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, pp. 141-3.
7 From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 142. In other readings Shu and Tefnut were spat out by Ra-Atum.
8 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 27. The figure 3126 is given in some accounts.
9 The Pyramids: An Enigma Solved, p. 13; C. Jacq, Egyptian Magic, Aris and Phillips, Warminster, 1985, p. 8; The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 36.


The Egyptians called Heliopolis Innu, the pillar, because tradition had it that the Benben had been kept here in remote pre-dynastic times, when it had balanced on top of a pillar of rough-hewn stone.

The Benben was believed to have fallen from the skies. Unfortunately, it had been lost so long before that its appearance was no longer remembered by the time Senuseret took the throne in 1971 BC. In that period (the Twelfth Dynasty) all that was clearly recalled was that the Benben had been pyramidal in form, thus providing (together with the pillar on which it stood) a prototype for the shape of all future obelisks.



The name Benben was likewise applied to the pyramidion, or apex stone, usually placed on top of pyramids.10 In a symbolic sense, it was also associated closely and directly with Ra-Atum, of whom the ancient texts said,

‘You became high on the height; you rose up as the Benben stone in the Mansion of the Phoenix ...’11

Mansion of the Phoenix described the original temple at Heliopolis where the Benben had been housed. It reflected the fact that the mysterious object had also served as an enduring symbol for the mythical Phoenix, the divine Bennu bird whose appearances and disappearances were believed to be linked to violent cosmic cycles and to the destruction and rebirth of world ages.12



10 Kingship and the Gods, p. 153.

11 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 246.
12 For a more detailed discussion see The Orion Mystery, p. 17. Bauval suggests that the Benben may have been an oriented meteorite: ‘From depictions it would seem that this meteorite was from six to fifteen tons in mass ... the frightful spectacle of its fiery fall would have been very impressive ...’, p. 204.



Connections and similarities
Driving through the suburbs of Heliopolis at around 6:30 in the morning I closed my eyes and tried to summon up a picture of the landscape as it might have looked in the mythical First Time after the Island of Creation13—the primordial mound of Ra-Atum—had risen out of the flood waters of the Nun.



It was tempting to see a connection between this imagery and the Andean traditions that spoke of the emergence of the civilizer god Viracocha from the waters of Lake Titicaca after an earth-destroying flood. Moreover there was the figure of Osiris to consider—a conspicuously bearded figure, like Viracocha, and like Quetzalcoatl as well—remembered for having abolished cannibalism among the Egyptians, for having taught them agriculture and animal husbandry, and for introducing them to such arts as writing, architecture, and music.14



13 The Penguin Dictionary of Religions, Penguin Books, London, 1988, p. 166.
14 E.g. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Introduction, p. XLIX; Qsiris And The Egyptian Resurrection, volume II, pp. 1-11.

The similarities between the Old and New World traditions were hard to miss but even harder to interpret. It was possible they were just a series of beguiling coincidences. On the other hand, it was possible that they might reveal the fingerprints of an ancient and unidentified global civilization—fingerprints that were essentially the same whether they appeared in the myths of Central America, or of the high Andes, or of Egypt.



The priests of Heliopolis, after all, had taught of the creation, but who had taught them? Had they sprung out of nowhere, or was it more likely that their doctrine, with all its complex symbolism, was the product of a long refinement of religious ideas?


If so, when and where had these ideas developed?

I looked up to discover that we had left Heliopolis behind and were winding our way through the noisy and crowded streets of down-town Cairo. We crossed over to the west bank of the Nile by way of the 6 October Bridge and soon afterwards entered Giza. Fifteen minutes later, passing the massive bulk of the Great Pyramid on our right, we turned south on the road to upper Egypt, a road which followed the meridional course of the world’s longest river through a landscape of palms and green fields fringed by the encroaching red wastes of pitiless deserts.

The ideas of the Heliopolitan priesthood had influenced every aspect of secular and religious life in Ancient Egypt, but had those ideas developed locally, or had they been introduced to the Nile Valley from elsewhere? The traditions of the Egyptians provided an unambiguous answer to questions such as these. All the wisdom of Heliopolis was a legacy, they said, and this legacy had been passed to humankind by the gods.



Gift of the Gods?
About ten miles south of the Great Pyramid we pulled off the main road to visit the necropolis of Saqqara. Rearing up on the desert’s edge, the site was dominated by a six-tier ziggurat, the step-pyramid of the Third Dynasty Pharaoh Zoser. This imposing monument, almost 200 feet tall, was dated to approximately 2650 BC.



It stood within its own compound, surrounded by an elegant enclosure wall, and was reckoned by archaeologists to be the earliest massive construction of stone ever attempted by humanity.15 Tradition had it that its architect was the legendary Imhotep, ‘Great of Magic’, a high priest of Heliopolis, whose other titles were Sage, Sorcerer, Astronomer and Doctor.16

15 Tradition had it that its architect was the legendary Imhotep, ‘Great of Magic’, a high priest of Heliopolis, whose other titles were Sage, Sorcerer, Astronomer and Doctor.

16 16 Ibid., p. 158.

Saqqara.


We shall have more to say about the step-pyramid and its builder in a later chapter, but on this occasion I had not come to Saqqara to see it. My sole objective was to spend a few moments in the burial chamber of the nearby pyramid of Unas, a Fifth Dynasty pharaoh who had reigned from 2356 to 2323 BC.17



The walls of this chamber, which I had visited several times before, were inscribed from floor to ceiling with the most ancient of the Pyramid Texts, an extravaganza of hieroglyphic inscriptions giving voice to a range of remarkable ideas—in acute contrast to the mute and unadorned interiors of the Fourth Dynasty pyramids at Giza.

A phenomenon exclusively of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties (2465-2152 BC), the Pyramid Texts were sacred writings, parts of which were thought to have been composed by the Heliopolitan priesthood in the late third millennium BC, and parts of which had been received and handed down by them from pre-dynastic times.18 It was the latter parts of these Texts, dating to a remote and impenetrable antiquity, which had particularly aroused my curiosity when I had begun to research them a few months previously.



17 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.

18 From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 147: ‘Judging by the Pyramid Texts, the priests of Heliopolis borrowed very largely from the religious beliefs of the predynastic Egyptians ...’ See also The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, p. 11.



I had also been amused—and a little intrigued—by the strange way that nineteenth century French archaeologists appeared almost to have been directed to the hidden chamber of the Pyramid Texts by a mythological ‘opener of the ways.’ According to reasonably well-documented reports, an Egyptian foreman of the excavations at Saqqara had been up and about at dawn one morning and had found himself by the side of a ruined pyramid looking into the bright amber eyes of a lone desert jackal:

It was as if the animal were taunting his human observer ... and inviting the puzzled man to chase him. Slowly the jackal sauntered towards the north face of the pyramid, stopping for a moment before disappearing into a hole. The bemused Arab decided to follow his lead. After slipping through the narrow hole, he found himself crawling into the dark bowels of the pyramid.



Soon he emerged into a chamber and, lifting his light, saw that the walls were covered from top to bottom with hieroglyphic inscriptions. These were carved with exquisite craftsmanship into the solid limestone and painted over with turquoise and gold.’19

Today the hieroglyph-lined chamber beneath the ruined pyramid of Unas is still reached through the north face by the long descending passage the French archaeological team excavated soon after the foreman’s astonishing discovery. The chamber consists of two rectangular rooms separated by a partition wall, into which is let a low doorway. Both rooms are covered by a gabled ceiling painted with myriads of stars.



Emerging stooped from the cramped passage, Santha and I entered the first of the two rooms and passed through the connecting doorway into the second. This was the tomb chamber proper, with the massive black granite sarcophagus of Unas at its western end and the strange utterances of the Pyramid Texts proclaiming themselves from every wall.

Speaking to us directly (rather than through riddles and mathematical legerdemain like the unadorned walls of the Great Pyramid), what were the hieroglyphs saying? I knew that the answer depended to some extent on which translation you were using, largely because the language of the Pyramid Texts contained so many archaic forms and so many unfamiliar mythological allusions that scholars were obliged to fill in the gaps in their knowledge with guesswork.20



Nevertheless it was generally agreed that the late R. O. Faulkner, a professor of the Ancient Egyptian Language at University College London, had produced the most authoritative version.21

Faulkner, whose translation I had studied line by line, described the Texts as constituting,

‘the oldest corpus of Egyptian religious and funerary literature now extant’ and added, ‘they are the least corrupt of all such collections and are of fundamental importance to the student of Egyptian religion ...’22

The reason why the Texts were so important (as many scholars agreed), was that they were the last completely open channel connecting the relatively short period of the past that humanity remembers to the far longer period that has been forgotten:

‘They vaguely disclose to us a vanished world of thought and speech, the last of the unnumbered aeons through which prehistoric man has passed, till finally he ... enters the historic age.’23

19 The Orion Mystery, pp. 57-8.
20 Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, pp. 166; The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. V: ‘The Pyramid Texts ... include very ancient texts ... There are many mythological and other allusions of which the purport is obscure to the translator of today ...’

21 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts.

22 Ibid., p. v.
23 James Henry Breasted, The Dawn of Conscience, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1944, p. 69.

It was hard to disagree with sentiments like these: the Texts did disclose a vanished world. But what intrigued me most about this world was the possibility that it might have been inhabited not only by primitive savages (as one would have expected in remote prehistory) but, paradoxically, by men and women whose minds had been enlightened by a scientific understanding of the cosmos.



The overall picture was equivocal: there were genuinely primitive elements locked into the Pyramid Texts alongside the loftier sequences of ideas. Nevertheless, every time I immersed myself in what Egyptologists call ‘these ancient spells’, I was impressed by the strange glimpses they seemed to afford of a high intelligence at work, darting from behind layers of incomprehension, reporting on experiences that ‘prehistoric man’ should never have had and expressing notions he should never have been able to formulate.



In short, the effect the Texts achieved through the medium of hieroglyphs was akin to the effect the Great Pyramid achieved through the medium of architecture. In both cases the dominant impression was of anachronism—of advanced technological processes used or described at a period in human history when there was supposed to have been no technology at all ...


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Chapter 42 - Anachronisms and Enigmas


I looked around the grey-walled chamber of Unas, up and down the long registers of hieroglyphs in which the Pyramid Texts were inscribed. They were written in a dead language. Nevertheless, the constant affirmation, repeated over and over again in these ancient compositions, was that of life—eternal life—which was to be achieved through the pharaoh’s rebirth as a star in the constellation of Orion.



As the reader will recall from Chapter Nineteen, (where we compared Egyptian beliefs with those of Ancient Mexico), there were several utterances which voiced this aspiration explicitly:

Oh King, you are this Great Star, the Companion of Orion, who traverses the sky
with Orion ... you ascend from the east of the sky being renewed in your due
season, and rejuvenated in your due time ...’1

Though undeniably beautiful there was nothing inherently extraordinary about these sentiments, and it was by no means impossible to attribute them to a people assessed by the French archaeologist Gaston Maspero as having ‘always remained half savage’.2



Furthermore, since Maspero had been the first Egyptologist to enter the pyramid of Unas,3 and was considered a great authority on the Texts, it was hardly surprising that his opinions should have shaped all academic responses to this literature since he began to publish translations from it in the 1880s.4 Maspero (with a little help from a jackal) had brought the Pyramid Texts to the world.



1 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, lines 882, 883; see also, inter alia, lines 2115 and 2116.

2 The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, p. 117.

3 He did so on 28 February 1881; see The Orion Mystery, p. 59.

4 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. v.



Thereafter, the dominance of his particular prejudices about the past had functioned as a filter on knowledge, inhibiting variant interpretations of the more opaque or puzzling utterances. This seemed to me to be unfortunate to say the least. What it meant was that, despite the technical and scientific puzzles raised by monuments like the Great Pyramid at Giza, scholars had ignored the implications of some striking passages in the Texts.

These passages sounded suspiciously like attempts to express complex technical and scientific imagery in an entirely inappropriate idiom. Maybe it was coincidence, but the result resembled the outcome that we might expect today if we were to try to translate Einstein’s Theory of Relativity into Chaucerian English or to describe a supersonic aircraft in vocabulary derived from Middle High German.


Broken images of a lost technology?
Take for example some of the peculiar equipment and accessories designated for the pharaoh’s use as he journeyed to his eternal resting place among the stars:

The gods who are in the sky are brought to you, the gods who are on earth assemble for you, they place their hands under you, they make a ladder for you that you may ascend on it into the sky, the doors of the sky are thrown open to you, the doors of the starry firmament are thrown open for you.5


The ascending pharaoh was identified with, and frequently referred to, as ‘an Osiris’. Osiris himself, as we have seen, was frequently linked to and associated with the constellation of Orion.



Osiris-Orion was said to have been the first to have climbed the great ladder the gods had made. And several utterances left no doubt that this ladder had not extended upwards from earth to heaven but downwards from heaven to earth. It was described as a rope-ladder6 and the belief was that it had hung from an ‘iron plate’ suspended in the sky.7

Were we dealing here, I wondered, simply with the bizarre imaginings of half-savage priests? Or might there be some other explanation for allusions such as these?

In Utterance 261,

‘The King is a flame, moving before the wind to the end of the sky and to the end of the earth ... the King travels the air and traverses the earth ... there is brought to him a way of ascent to the sky ...’8

Switching to dialogue, Utterance 310 proclaimed,

‘O you whose vision is in his face and whose vision is in the back of his head, bring this to me!’
‘What ferry-boat shall be brought to you?’
‘Bring me: “It-flies-and-alights”.’9

Utterance 332, supposedly spoken by the King himself, confided,

‘I am this one who has escaped from the coiled serpent, I have ascended in a blast of fire having turned myself about. The two skies go to me.10

5 Ibid., p. 227, Utt. 572.
6 Ibid., p. 297, Utt. 688: ‘Atum has done what he said he would do for this King; he ties the rope-ladder for him.’

7 The Gods of the Egyptians, volume II, p. 241.

8 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 70, Utt. 261.

9 Ibid., p. 97.

10 Ibid., p. 107.

And in Utterance 669 it was asked, ‘Wherewith can the King be made to fly-up?’

The reply was given:

‘There shall be brought to you the Hnw-bark [italicized word untranslatable] and the ... [text missing] of the hn-bird [italicized word untranslatable]. You shall fly up therewith ... You shall fly up and alight.’11

Other passages also seemed to me worthy of more thorough investigation than they have received from scholars. Here are a few examples:

O my father, great King, the aperture of the sky-window is opened for you.12

‘The door of the sky at the horizon opens to you, the gods are glad at meeting you
... May you sit on this iron throne of yours, as the Great One who is in Heliopolis.13

O King, may you ascend ... The sky reels at you, the earth quakes at you, the
Imperishable Stars are afraid of you. I have come to you, O you whose seats are
hidden, that I may embrace you in the sky ...14

The earth speaks, the gate of the earth god is open, the doors of Geb are opened
for you ... May you remove yourself to the sky upon your iron throne.15

O my father the King, such is your going when you have gone as a god, your
travelling as a celestial being ... you stand in the Conclaves of the horizon ... and
sit on this throne of iron at which the gods marvel ...16

The constant references to iron, though easy to overlook, were puzzling. Iron, I knew, had been a rare metal in Ancient Egypt, particularly in the Pyramid Age when it had supposedly only been available in meteoritic form.17 Yet here, in the Pyramid Texts, there seemed to be an embarrassment of iron riches: iron plates in the sky, iron thrones, and elsewhere an iron sceptre (Utterance 665C) and even iron bones for the King (Utterances 325, 684 and 723).18

In the Ancient Egyptian language the name for iron had been bja, a word that meant literally ‘metal of heaven’ or ‘divine metal ’.19 The knowledge of iron was thus regarded as yet another gift from the gods ...



11 Ibid., p. 284.
12 Ibid., p. 249, Utt. 604.
13 Ibid., pp. 253-4, Utt. 610.
14 Ibid., p. 280, Utt. 667.
15 Ibid., p. 170, Utt. 483.
16 Ibid., p. 287, Utt. 673.
17 B. Scheel, Egyptian Metalworking and Tools, Shire Egyptology, Aylesbury, 1989; G. A. Wainwright, ‘Iron in Egypt’, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, vol. 18, 1931.

18 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, pp. 276, 105, 294, 311.

19 Egyptian Metalworking and Tools, p. 17; ‘Iron in Egypt’, p. 6ff.
20 Among the many mysterious aspects of the Pyramid Texts it is perhaps inevitable that a fully qualified Opener of the Ways should put in an appearance. ‘The doors of the sky are opened to you, the starry sky is thrown open for you, the jackal of upper Egypt comes down to you as Anubis at your side.’ (The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, pp. 288-9, Utt. 675.) Here, as in other contexts, the function of the canine figure seems to be to serve as a guide to secret hoards of esoteric information often linked to mathematics and astronomy.



Repositories of a lost science?
What other fingerprints might these gods have left behind in the Pyramid Texts? 20

In my readings—here and there among the most archaic of the Utterances—I had come across several metaphors that seemed to refer to the passage of epochs of precessional time. These metaphors stood out from the surrounding material because they were expressed in what had become a clear and familiar terminology to me: that of the archaic scientific language identified by Santillana and von Dechend in Hamlet’s Mill.21

The reader may recall that a cosmic ‘diagram’ of the four props of the sky was one of the standard thought tools employed in that ancient language. Its purpose was to assist visualization of the four imaginary bands conceived as framing, supporting and defining a precessional world age.



These were what astronomers call the ‘equinoctial and solstitial colures’ and were seen as hooping down from the celestial north pole and marking the four constellations against the background of which, for periods of 2160 years at a time, the sun would consistently rise on the spring and autumn equinoxes and on the winter and summer solstices.22

The Pyramid Texts appear to contain several versions of this diagram. Moreover, as is so often the case with prehistoric myths which transmit hard astronomical data, the precessional symbolism is interwoven tightly with violent images of terrestrial destruction—as though to suggest that the ‘breaking of the mill of heaven’, that is the transition every 2160 years from one zodiacal age to another, could under ill-omened circumstances bring catastrophic influences to bear on terrestrial events.

Thus it was said that

Ra-Atum, the god who created himself, was originally king over gods and men
together but mankind schemed against his sovereignty, for he began to grow old,
his bones became silver, his flesh gold and his hair [as] lapis lazuli.23

When he realized what was happening, the ageing Sun God (so reminiscent of Tonatiuh, the bloodthirsty Fifth Sun of the Aztecs) determined that he would punish this insurrection by killing off most of the human race. The instrument of the havoc he unleashed was symbolized at times as a raging lioness wading in blood and at times as the fearsome lion-headed goddess Sekhmet who ‘poured fire out of herself and savaged mankind in an ecstasy of slaughter.24

21 See Part V for full details.
22 Ibid.
23 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, p. 181.

24 The pouring fire allusion is cited in Jean-Pierre Hallet, Pygmy Kitabu, p. 185.

The terrible destruction continued unabated for a long period. Then at last Ra intervened to save the lives of a ‘remnant’, the ancestors of present humanity. This intervention took the form of a flood which the lioness thirstily lapped up and then fell asleep. When she awoke, she was no longer interested in pursuing the destruction, and peace descended upon the devastated world.25

Meanwhile Ra had resolved to ‘draw away’ from what was left of his creation:

‘As I live my heart is weary of staying with Mankind. I have gone on killing them [almost] to the very last one, so the [insignificant] remnant is not my affair ...’26

The Sun God then rose into the sky on the back of the sky-goddess Nut who (for the purposes of the precessional metaphor about to be delivered) had transformed herself into a cow. Before very long—in a close analogy to the ‘shaft-tree’ that ‘shivered’ on Amlodhi’s wildly gyrating mill—the cow grew ‘dizzy and began to shake and to tremble because she was so high above the earth.’27



When she complained to Ra about this precarious state of affairs he commanded,

‘Let my son Shu be put beneath Nut to keep guard for me over the heavenly supports—which exist in the twilight. Put her above your head and keep her there.’28

As soon as Shu had taken his place beneath the cow and had stabilized her body, ‘the heavens above and the earth beneath came into being’. At the same moment, ‘the four legs of the cow’, as Egyptologist Wallis Budge commented in his classic study The Gods of the Egyptians, ‘became the four props of heaven at the four cardinal points’.29

Like most scholars, Budge understandably assumed that the ‘cardinal points’ referred to in this Ancient Egyptian tradition had strictly terrestrial connotations and that ‘heaven’ represented nothing more than the sky above our heads. He took it for granted that the point of the metaphor was for us to envisage the cow’s four legs as positioned at the four points of the compass—north, south, east and west.



He also thought—and even today few Egyptologists would disagree with him—that the simpleminded priests of Heliopolis had actually believed that the sky had four corners which were supported on four legs and that Shu, ‘the skybearer par excellence’, had stood immobile like a pillar at the centre of the whole edifice.30



25 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, p. 181-5.

26 Ibid., p. 184.
27 Ibid., p. 185.
28 The Gods of the Egyptians, volume II, p. 94.

29 Ibid., p. 92-4.
30 Ibid., p. 93.

Reinterpreted in the light of Santillana’s and von Dechend’s findings, however, Shu and the four legs of the celestial cow look much more like the components of an archaic scientific symbol depicting the frame of a precessional world age—the polar axis (Shu) and the colures (the four legs or ‘props’ marking the equinoctial and solstitial cardinal points in the annual round of the sun).

Moreover, it is tempting to speculate which world age was being signalled here ...

With a cow involved it could have been the Age of Taurus, although the Egyptians knew the difference between bulls and cows as well as anyone. But a much more likely contender—at any rate on purely symbolic grounds—is the Age of Leo, from approximately 10,970 to 8810 BC.31 The reason is that Sekhmet, the agent of the destruction of Mankind referred to in the myth, was leonine in form.



What better way to symbolize the troubled birth of the new world age of Leo than to depict its harbinger as a rampaging lion, particularly since the Age of Leo coincided with the final ferocious meltdown of the last Ice Age, during which huge numbers of animal species all over the earth were suddenly and violently rendered extinct.’32 Mankind survived the immense floods and earthquakes and rapid changes of climate that took place, but very probably in much reduced numbers and much reduced circumstances.



31 Skyglobe 3.6.
32 See Part IV.



The train of the Sun and the dweller in Sirius
Of course the ability to recognize and define precessional world ages in myth implies that the Ancient Egyptians possessed better observational astronomy and a more sophisticated understanding of the mechanics of the solar system than any ancient people have hitherto been credited with.33



There is no doubt that knowledge of this calibre, if it existed at all, would have been highly regarded by the Ancient Egyptians, who would have transmitted it from generation to generation in a secretive manner. Indeed, it would have ranked among the highest arcana entrusted to the keeping of the priestly elite at Heliopolis and would have been passed on, in the main, through an oral and initiatory tradition.34 If, by chance it had found its way into the Pyramid Texts, is it not likely that its form would have been veiled by metaphors and allegories?

I walked slowly across the dusty floor of the tomb chamber of Unas, noting the heavy stillness in the air, casting my eyes over the faded blue and gold inscriptions. Expressed in coded language several millennia before Copernicus and Galileo, some of the passages inscribed on these walls seemed to offer clues to the true heliocentric nature of the solar system.

33 For a detailed discussion see Sacred Science: The King of Pharaonic Theocracy.
34 The issue of priestly secrecy and the oral tradition is discussed at length in From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, e.g. p. 43: ‘It is impossible to think that the highest order of the priests did not possess esoteric knowledge which they guarded with the greatest care. Each priesthood ... possessed a “Gnosis”, a “superiority of knowledge”, which they never put into writing ... It is therefore absurd to expect to find in Egyptian papyri descriptions of the secrets which formed the esoteric knowledge of the priests.’ See also page 27, and Sacred Science, pp. 273-4.

In one, for example, Ra, the Sun God, was depicted as seated upon an iron throne encircled by lesser gods who moved around him constantly and who were said to be ‘in his train’.35 Likewise, in another passage, the deceased Pharaoh was urged to ‘stand at the head of the two halves of the sky and weigh the words of the gods, the aged ones, who revolve around Ra.’36

If the ‘aged ones’ and the ‘encircling gods’ revolving around Ra should prove to be parts of a terminology referring to the planets of our solar system, the original authors of the Pyramid Texts must have enjoyed access to some remarkably advanced astronomical data. They must have known that the earth and the planets revolved around the sun rather than vice versa.37



The problem this raises is that neither the Ancient Egyptians at any stage in their history, nor even their successors the Greeks, or for that matter the Europeans until the Renaissance, are supposed to have possessed cosmological data of anything approaching this quality.



How, therefore, can its presence be explained in compositions which date back to the dawn of Egyptian civilization?

Another (and perhaps related) mystery concerns the star Sirius, which the Egyptians identified with Isis, the sister and consort of Osiris and the mother of Horus. In a passage addressed to Osiris himself, the Pyramid Texts state:

Thy sister Isis cometh unto thee rejoicing in her love for thee. Thou settest her upon thee, thy issue entereth into her, and she becometh great with child like the star Sept [Sirius, the Dog Star]. Horus-Sept cometh forth from thee in the form of Horus, dweller in Sept.38

Many interpretations of this passage are, of course, possible. What intrigued me, however, was the clear implication that Sirius was to be regarded as a dual entity in some way comparable to a woman ‘great with child’. Moreover, after the birth (or coming forth) of that child, the text makes a special point of reminding us that Horus remained a ‘dweller in Sept’, presumably suggesting that he stayed close to his mother.

Sirius is an unusual star. A sparkling point of light particularly prominent in the winter months in the night skies of the northern hemisphere, it consists of a binary star system, i.e. it is in fact, as the Pyramid Texts suggest, a ‘dual entity’. The major component, Sirius-A, is what we see. Sirius-B, on the other hand—the dwarf-star which revolves around Sirius A—is absolutely invisible to the naked eye.



Its existence did not become known to Western science until 1862, when US astronomer Alvin Clark spotted it through one of the largest and most advanced telescopes of the day.39 How could the scribes who wrote the Pyramid Texts possibly have obtained the information that Sirius was two stars in one?

35 Pyramid Texts cited in The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, p. 158.

36 Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 146.

37 Sacred Science, pp. 22-5, 29.

38 Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 93.

39 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 10:845.

In The Sirius Mystery, an important book published in 1976, I knew that the American author Robert Temple had offered some extraordinary answers to this question.40 His study focused on the traditional beliefs of the Dogon tribe of West Africa—beliefs in which the binary character of Sirius was explicitly described and in which the correct figure of fifty years was given for the period of the orbit of Sirius-B around Sirius-A.41



Temple argued cogently that this high quality technical information had been passed down to the Dogon from the Ancient Egyptians through a process of cultural diffusion, and that it was to the Ancient Egyptians that we should look for an answer to the Sirius mystery. He also concluded that the Ancient Egyptians must have received the information from intelligent beings from the region of Sirius’.42

Like Temple, I had begun to suspect that the more advanced and sophisticated elements of Egyptian science made sense only if they were understood as parts of an inheritance. Unlike Temple, I saw no urgent reason to attribute that inheritance to extra-terrestrials.



To my mind the anomalous star knowledge the Heliopolitan priests had apparently possessed was more plausibly explained as the legacy of a lost human civilization which, against the current of history, had achieved a high level of technological advancement in remote antiquity. It seemed to me that the building of an instrument capable of detecting Sirius-B might not have been beyond the ingenuity of the unknown explorers and scientists who originated the remarkable maps of the prehistoric world discussed in Part I.



Nor would it have daunted the unknown astronomers and measurers of time who bequeathed to the Ancient Maya a calendar of amazing complexity, a data-base about the movements of the heavenly bodies which could only have been the product of thousands of years of accurately recorded observations, and a facility with very large numbers that seemed more appropriate to the needs of a complex technological society than to those of a ‘primitive’ Central American kingdom.43


40 The Sirius Mystery.
41 Ibid., p. 3.
42 Ibid., p. 1.
43 See Part III.
44 The Egyptian Book of the Dead, p. cxi.




Millions of years and the movements of the stars
Very large numbers also appeared in the Pyramid Texts, in the symbolic ‘boat of millions of years’, for example, in which the Sun God was said to navigate the dark and airless wastes of interstellar space.44 Thoth, the god of wisdom (‘he who reckons in heaven, the counter of the stars, the measurer of the earth’) was specifically empowered to grant a life of millions of years to the deceased pharaoh.45



Osiris, ‘king of eternity, lord of everlasting’, was described as traversing millions of years in his life.’46 And figures like ‘tens of millions of years’ (as well as the more mind-boggling ‘one million of millions of years’)47 occurred often enough to suggest that some elements at least of Ancient Egyptian culture must have evolved for the convenience of scientifically minded people with more than passing insight into the immensity of time.

Such a people would, of course, have required an excellent calendar— one that would have facilitated complex and accurate calculations. It was therefore not surprising to learn that the Ancient Egyptians, like the Maya, had possessed such a calendar and that their understanding of its workings seemed to have declined, rather than improved, as the ages went by.48



It was tempting to see this as the gradual erosion of a corpus of knowledge inherited an extremely long time ago, an impression supported by the Ancient Egyptians themselves, who made no secret of their belief that their calendar was a legacy which they had received ‘from the gods’.

We consider the possible identity of these gods in more detail in the following chapters. Whoever they were, they must have spent a great deal of their time observing the stars, and they had accumulated a fund of advanced and specialized knowledge concerning the star Sirius in particular. Further evidence for this came in the form of the most useful calendrical gift which the gods supposedly gave to the Egyptians: the Sothic (or Sirian) cycle.49

The Sothic cycle was based on what is referred to in technical jargon as ‘the periodic return of the heliacal rising of Sirius’, which is the first appearance of this star after a seasonal absence, rising at dawn just ahead of the sun in the eastern portion of the sky.50 In the case of Sirius the interval between one such rising and the next amounts to exactly 365.25 days—a mathematically harmonious figure, uncomplicated by further decimal points, which is just twelve minutes longer than the duration of the solar year.51



45 Ibid., p. cxviii. See also The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, p. 400.

46 The Egyptian Book of the Dead, p. 8.

47 Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume II, p. 248.

48 For a full discussion see Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, particularly pp. 328-30.

49 Sacred Science, p. 27.

50 Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 27.

51 Sacred Science, p. 172.

The curious thing about Sirius is that out of an estimated 2000 stars in the heavens visible to the naked eye it is the only one to rise heliacally at this precise and nicely rounded interval of 365 and a quarter days—a unique product of its ‘proper motion’ (the speed of its own movement through space) combined with the effects of precession of the equinoxes.52



Moreover, it is known that the day of the heliacal rising of Sirius—New Year’s Day in the Ancient Egyptian calendar—was traditionally calculated at Heliopolis, where the Pyramid Texts were compiled, and announced ahead of time to all the other major temples up and down the Nile.53

I remembered that Sirius was referred to directly in the Pyramid Texts by ‘her name of the New Year’.54 Together with other relevant utterances (e.g., 669 55), this confirmed that the Sothic calendar was at least as old as the Texts themselves,56 and their origins stretched back into the mists of distant antiquity.



The great enigma, therefore, is this: in such an early period, who could have possessed the necessary know-how to observe and take note of the coincidence of the period of 365.25 days with the heliacal rising of Sirius—a coincidence described by the French mathematician R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz as ‘an entirely exceptional celestial phenomenon’?57

We cannot but admire the greatness of a science capable of discovering such a coincidence. The double star of Sirius was chosen because it was the only star that moves the needed distance and in the right direction against the background of the other stars. This fact, known four thousand years before our time and forgotten until our day, obviously demands an extraordinary and prolonged observation of the sky.58

It was such a legacy—built out of long centuries of precise observational astronomy and scientific record-keeping—that Egypt seems to have I benefited from at the beginning of the historical period and that was expressed in the Pyramid Texts.

In this, too, there lies a mystery ...



52 Ibid., p. 26-7. For numbers of stars visible to the naked eye see Ian Ridpath and Wil Tirion, Collins Guide to Stars and Planets, London, 1984, p. 4.

53 Sacred Science, p. 173.

54 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 165, line 964. Sacred Science, p. 287.
55 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, pp. 165, 284; Sacred Science, in particular p. 287ff.
56 The established archaeological horizon of the calendar can indeed be pushed back even further because of the recent discovery, in a First Dynasty tomb in upper Egypt, of an inscription reading, ‘Sothis, herald of the New Year’ (reported in Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 40.)

57 Sacred Science, p. 290.

58 Ibid., p. 27.
59 E. A. Wallis Budge, An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, (2 volumes), John Murray, London, 1920.


Copies, or translations?
Writing in 1934, the year of his death, Wallis Budge, former Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum and the author of an authoritative hieroglyphic dictionary,59 made this frank admission:

The Pyramid Texts are full of difficulties of every kind. The exact meanings of a large number of words found in them are unknown ... The construction of the sentence often baffles all attempts to translate it, and when it contains wholly unknown words it becomes an unsolved riddle. It is only reasonable to suppose that these texts were often used for funerary purposes, but it is quite clear that their period of use in Egypt was little more than one hundred years. Why they were suddenly brought into use at the end of the Fifth Dynasty and ceased to be used at the end of the Sixth Dynasty is inexplicable.’60

Could the answer be that they were copies of an earlier literature which Unas, the last pharaoh of the Fifth Dynasty, together with several of his successors in the Sixth Dynasty, had attempted to fix for ever in stone in the tomb chambers of their own pyramids? Budge thought so, and felt the evidence suggested that some at least of the source documents must have been exceedingly old:

Several passages bear evidence that the scribes who drafted the copies from which the cutters of the inscriptions worked did not understand what they were writing ... The general impression is that the priests who drafted the copies made extracts from several compositions of different ages and having different contents ...’61

60 From Fetish to God In Ancient Egypt, pp. 321-2.

61 Ibid., p. 322.


All this assumed that the source documents, whatever they were, must have been written in an archaic form of the Ancient Egyptian language. There was, however, an alternative possibility which Budge failed to consider. Suppose that the task of the priests had been not only to copy material but to translate into hieroglyphs texts originally composed in another language altogether?



If that language had included a technical terminology and references to artifacts and ideas for which no equivalent terms existed in Ancient Egyptian, this would provide an explanation for the strange impression given by certain of the utterances.



Moreover, if the copying and translating of the original source documents had been completed by the end of the Sixth Dynasty, it was easy to understand why no more ‘Pyramid Texts’ had ever been carved: the project would have come to a halt when it had fulfilled its objective—which would have been to create a permanent hieroglyphic record of a sacred literature that had already been tottering with age when Unas had taken the throne of Egypt in 2356 BC.



Last records of the First Time?
Because we wanted to cover as much of the distance to Abydos as was possible before nightfall, Santha and I reluctantly decided that it was time to get back on the road. Although we had originally intended to spend only a few minutes, the sombre gloom and ancient voices of the Unas tomb chamber had lulled our senses and almost two hours had passed since our arrival. Stooping, we left the tomb and climbed the steeply angled passageway to the exit, where we paused to allow our eyes to adjust to the harsh mid-morning sunlight.



As we did so, I took the opportunity to look over the pyramid itself, which had fallen into such a crumbling and thoroughly dilapidated state that its original form was barely recognizable. The core masonry, reduced to little more than a nondescript heap of rubble, was evidently of poor quality, and even the facing blocks—some of which were still intact—lacked the finesse and careful workmanship demonstrated by the older pyramids at Giza.

This was hard to explain in conventional historical terms. If the normal evolutionary processes that govern the development of architectural skills and ideas had been at work in Egypt, one would have expected to find the opposite to be true: the design, engineering and masonry of the Unas Pyramid should have been superior to these of the Giza group, which, according to orthodox chronology, had been built about two centuries previously.62



62 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.

The uncomfortable fact that this was not the case (i.e., Giza was ‘better’ than Unas and not vice versa) created knotty challenges for Egyptologists and raised questions to which no satisfactory answers had been supplied. To reiterate the central problem: everything about the three stunning and superb pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure proclaimed that they were the end products of hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years of accumulated architectural and engineering experience.



This was not supported by the archaeological evidence which left no doubt that they were among the earliest pyramids ever built in Egypt—in other words, they were not the products of the mature phase of that country’s pyramid-building experiment but, anomalously, were the creations of its infancy.

A further mystery also cried out for a solution. In the three great pyramids at Giza, Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty had reared up mansions of eternity—unprecedented and unsurpassed masterpieces of stone, hundreds of feet high, weighing millions of tons apiece, which incorporated many extremely advanced features.



No pyramids of comparable quality were ever built again. But only a little later, beneath the smaller, shabbier superstructures of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasty pyramids, a sort of Hall of Records seemed to have been deliberately created: a permanent exhibition of copies or translations of archaic documents which was, at the same time, an unprecedented and unsurpassed masterpiece of scribal and hieroglyphic art.

In short, like the pyramids at Giza, it seemed that the Pyramid Texts had burst upon the scene with no apparent antecedents, and had occupied centre-stage for approximately a hundred years before ‘ceasing operations’, never to be bettered.

Presumably the ancient kings and sages who had arranged these things had known what they were doing? If so, their minds must have contained a plan, and they must have intended a strong connection to be seen between the completely uninscribed (but technically brilliant)—pyramids at Giza, and the brilliantly inscribed (but technically slipshod) pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties.

I suspected, too, that at least part of the answer to the problem might lie in the pyramid-field of Dahshur, which we passed fifteen minutes after leaving Saqqara. It was here that the so-called ‘Bent’ and ‘Red’ Pyramids were located. Attributed to Sneferu, Khufu’s father, these two monuments (by all accounts very well preserved) had been closed to the public many years ago. A military base had been built around them and they had for a long while been impossible to visit—under any circumstances, ever ...

As we continued our journey south, through the bright colours of that December day, I was overtaken by a compelling sense that the Nile Valley had been the scene of momentous events for humanity long before the recorded history of mankind began. All the most ancient records and traditions of Egypt spoke of such events and associated them with the epoch during which the gods had ruled on earth: the fabled First Time, which was called Zep Tepi.63 We shall delve into these records in the next two chapters.

63 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, p. 263.

Chapter 43 - Looking for the First Time


Here is what the Ancient Egyptians said about the First Time, Zep Tepi, when the gods ruled in their country: they said it was a golden age1 during which the waters of the abyss receded, the primordial darkness was banished, and humanity, emerging into the light, was offered the gifts of civilization.2 They spoke also of intermediaries between gods and men—the Urshu, a category of lesser divinities whose title meant ‘the Watchers’.3



And they preserved particularly vivid recollections of the gods themselves, puissant and beautiful beings called the Neteru who lived on earth with humankind and exercised their sovereignty from Heliopolis and other sanctuaries up and down the Nile. Some of these Neteru were male and some female but all possessed a range of supernatural powers which included the ability to appear, at will, as men or women, or as animals, birds, reptiles, trees or plants.



Paradoxically, their words and deeds seem to have reflected human passions and preoccupations. Likewise, although they were portrayed as stronger and more intelligent than humans, it was believed that they could grow sick—or even die, or be killed—under certain circumstances.4



1 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, pp. 263-4; see also Nicolas Grimal, A History of Ancient Egypt, Blackwell, Cambridge, 1992, p. 46.

2 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 16.
3 The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, pp. 84, 161; The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, pp. 124, 308.

4 Osiris And The Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 352.



Records of prehistory
Archaeologists are adamant that the epoch of the gods, which the Ancient Egyptians, called the First Time, is nothing more than a myth. The Ancient Egyptians, however, who may have been better informed about their past than we are, did not share this view.



The historical records they kept in their most venerable temples included comprehensive lists of all the kings of Egypt: lists naming every pharaoh of every dynasty recognized by scholars today.5 Some of these lists went even further, reaching back beyond the historical horizon of the First Dynasty into the uncharted depths of a remote and profound antiquity.



5 Michael Hoffman, Egypt before the Pharaohs, Michael O’Mara Books, 1991, pp. 12-13; Archaic Egypt, pp. 21-3; The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, pp. 138-9.

Two lists of kings in this category have survived the ravages of the ages and, having been exported from Egypt, are now preserved in European museums. We shall consider these lists in more detail later in this chapter. They are known respectively as the Palermo Stone (dating from the Fifth Dynasty—around the twenty-fifth century BC), and the Turin Papyrus, a nineteenth Dynasty temple document inscribed in a cursive form of hieroglyphs known as hieratic and dated to the thirteenth century BC.6

In addition, we have the testimony of a Heliopolitan priest named Manetho. In the third century BC he compiled a comprehensive and widely respected history of Egypt which provided extensive king lists for the entire dynastic period. Like the Turin Papyrus and the Palermo Stone, Manetho’s history also reached much further back into the past to speak of a distant epoch when gods had ruled in the Nile Valley.

Manetho’s complete text has not come down to us, although copies of it seem to have been in circulation as late as the ninth century AD.7 Fortuitously, however, fragments of it were preserved in the writings of the Jewish chronicler Josephus (AD 60) and of Christian writers such as Africanus (AD 300), Eusebius (AD 340) and George Syncellus (AD 800).8 These fragments, in the words of the late Professor Michael Hoffman of the University of South Carolina, provide the ‘framework for modern approaches to the study of Egypt’s past’.9

This is quite true.10 Nevertheless, Egyptologists are prepared to use Manetho only as a source for the historical (dynastic) period and repudiate the strange insights he provides into prehistory when he speaks of the remote golden age of the First Time.

Why should we be so selective in our reliance on Manetho?

What is the logic of accepting thirty ‘historical’ dynasties from him and rejecting all that he has to say about earlier epochs?

Moreover, since we know that his chronology for the historical period has been vindicated by archaeology,11 isn’t it a bit premature for us to assume that his pre-dynastic chronology is wrong because excavations have not yet turned up evidence confirming it?12

6 Egypt before the Pharaohs, pp. 12-13; The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, pp. 200, 268.
7 Egypt before the Pharaohs, p. 12.
8 Archaic Egypt, p. 23; Manetho, (trans. W. G. Waddell), William Heinemann, London, 1940, Introduction pp. xvi-xvii.

9 Egypt before the Pharaohs, p. 11.

10 Ibid., p. 11-13; Archaic Egypt, pp. 5, 23.

11 See, for example, Egypt before the Pharaohs, pp. 11-13.
12 This is a particularly important point to remember in a discipline like Egyptology where so much of the record of the past has been lost through looting, the ravages of time, and the activities of archaeologists and treasure hunters. Besides, vast numbers of Ancient Egyptian sites have not been investigated at all, and many more may lie out of our reach beneath the millennial silt of the Nile Delta (or beneath the suburbs of Cairo for that matter), and even at well-studied locations such as the Giza necropolis there are huge areas—the bedrock beneath the Sphinx for example—which still await the attentions of the excavator.



Gods, Demigods and Spirits of the Dead
If we are to allow Manetho to speak for himself, we have no choice but to turn to the texts in which the fragments of his work are preserved. One of the most important of these is the Armenian version of the Chronica of Eusebius. It begins by informing us that it is extracted,

‘from the Egyptian History of Manetho, who composed his account in three books. These deal with the Gods, the Demigods, the Spirits of the Dead and the mortal kings who ruled Egypt ...’13

Citing Manetho directly, Eusebius begins by reeling off a list of the gods which consists, essentially, of the familiar Ennead of Heliopolis—Ra, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Set, and so on:14

These were the first to hold sway in Egypt. Thereafter, the kingship passed from one to another in unbroken succession ... through 13,900 years — ... After the Gods, Demigods reigned for 1255 years; and again another line of kings held sway for 1817 years; then came thirty more kings, reigning for 1790 years; and then again ten kings ruling for 350 years. There followed the rule of the Spirits of the Dead ... for 5813 years ...’15

The total of all these periods adds up to 24,925 years and takes us far beyond the biblical date for the creation of the world (some time in the fifth millennium BC16). Because it suggested that biblical chronology was wrong, this created difficulties for Eusebius, a staunchly Christian commentator. But, after a moment’s thought, he overcame the problem in an inspired way:

‘The year I take to be a lunar one, consisting, that is, of 30 days: what we now call a month the Egyptians used formerly to style a year ...’17

Of course they did no such thing.18 By means of this sleight of hand, however, Eusebius and others succeeded in boiling down Manetho’s grand pre-dynastic span of almost 25,000 years into a sanitized dollop a bit over 2000 years which fits comfortably into the 2242 years orthodox biblical chronology allows between Adam and the Flood.19

A different technique for downplaying the disturbing chronological implications of Manetho’s evidence is employed by the monk George Syncellus (c. AD 800). This commentator, who relies entirely on invective, writes,

‘Manetho, chief priest of the accursed temples of Egypt [tells us] of gods who never existed. These, he says, reigned for 11,895 years ...’20

13 Manetho, p. 3.

14 Ibid., pp. 3-5.
15 Ibid., p. 5.
16 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 12:214-15.

17 Manetho, p. 5.

18 There is absolutely no evidence that the Ancient Egyptians ever confused years and months, or styled one as the other; ibid, p. 4, note 2.

19 Ibid., p. 7. 20 Ibid., p. 15.

Several other curious and contradictory numbers crop up in the fragments. In particular, Manetho is repeatedly said to have given the enormous figure of 36,525 years for the entire duration of the civilization of Egypt from the time of the gods down to the end of the thirtieth (and last) dynasty of mortal kings.21 This figure of course, incorporates the

365.25 days of the Sothic year (the interval between two consecutive heliacal risings of Sirius, as described in the last chapter). More likely by design than by accident, it also represents 25 cycles of 1460 Sothic years, and 25 cycles of 1461 calendar years (since the ancient Egyptian civil calendar was constructed around a ‘vague year’ of 365 days exactly).22



21 Ibid., p. 231; see also The Splendour that was Egypt, p. 12.
22 Like the Maya, (see Part III), the Ancient Egyptians made use for administrative purposes of a civil calendar year (or vague year) of 365 days exactly. See Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico, p. 151, for further details on the Maya vague year. The Ancient Egyptian civil calendar year was geared to the Sothic year so that both would coincide on the same day/month position once every 1461 calendar years.

What, if anything, does all this mean? It’s hard to be sure. Out of the welter of numbers and interpretations, however, there is one aspect of Manetho’s original message that comes through loud and clear. Irrespective of everything we have been taught about the orderly progress of history, what he seems to be telling us is that civilized beings (either gods or men) were present in Egypt for an immensely long period before the advent of the First Dynasty around 3100 BC.



Diodorus Siculus and Herodotus
In this assertion, Manetho finds much support among classical writers.

In the first century BC, for example, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus visited Egypt. He is rightly described by C.H. Oldfather, his most recent translator, as ‘an uncritical compiler who used good sources and reproduced them faithfully’.23 In plain English, what this means is that Diodorus did not try to impose his prejudices and preconceptions on the material he collected. He is therefore particularly valuable to us because his informants included Egyptian priests whom he questioned about the mysterious past of their country.



This is what they told him:

‘At first gods and heroes ruled Egypt for a little less than 18,000 years, the last of
the gods to rule being Horus, the son of Isis ... Mortals have been kings of their
country, they say, for a little less than 5000 years ...24

Let us review these figures ‘uncritically’ and see what they add up to. Diodorus was writing in the first century BC. If we journey back from there for the 5000 years during which the ‘mortal kings’ supposedly ruled, we get to around 5100 BC. If we go even further back to the beginning of the age of ‘gods and heroes’, we find that we have arrived at 23,100 BC, when the world was still firmly in the grip of the last Ice Age.

23 Diodorus Siculus, translated by C.H. Oldfather, Harvard University Press, 1989, jacket text.

24 Ibid., volume I, p. 157.

Long before Diodorus, Egypt was visited by another and more illustrious Greek historian: the great Herodotus, who lived in the fifth century BC. He too, it seems, consorted with priests and he too managed to tune in to traditions that spoke of the presence of a high civilization in the Nile Valley at some unspecified date in remote antiquity.



Herodotus outlines these traditions of an immense prehistoric period of Egyptian civilization in Book II of his History. In the same document he also hands on to us, without comment, a peculiar nugget of information which had originated with the priests of Heliopolis:

During this time, they said, there were four occasions when the sun rose out of his
wonted place—twice rising where he now sets, and twice setting where he now
rises.25

What is this all about?

According to the French mathematician Schwaller de Lubicz, what Herodotus is transmitting to us (perhaps unwittingly) is a veiled and garbled reference to a period of time—that is, to the time that it takes for sunrise on the vernal equinox to precess against the stellar background through one and a half complete cycles of the zodiac.26



25 The History, pp. 193-4. In the first century AD a similar tradition was recorded by the Roman scholar Pomponious Mela: ‘The Egyptians pride themselves on being the most ancient people in the world. In their authentic annals one may read that since they have been in existence, the course of the stars has changed direction four times, and that the sun has set twice in the part of the sky where it rises today.’ (Pomponious Mela, De Situ Orbis.)

26 Sacred Science, p. 87

As we have seen, the equinoctial sun spends roughly 2160 years in each of the twelve zodiacal constellations. A full cycle of precession of the equinoxes therefore takes almost 26,000 years to complete (12 x 2160 years). It follows that one and a half cycles takes nearly 39,000 years (18 x 2160 years).

In the time of Herodotus the sun on the vernal equinox rose due east at dawn against the stellar background of Aries—at which moment the constellation of Libra was ‘in opposition’, lying due west where the sun would set twelve hours later. If we wind the clock of precession back half a cycle, however—six houses of the zodiac or approximately 13,000 years—we find that the reverse configuration prevails: the vernal sun now rises due east in Libra while Aries lies due west in opposition. A further 13,000 years back, the situation reverses itself once more, with the vernal sun rising again in Aries and with Libra in opposition.

This takes us to 26,000 years before Herodotus.

If we then step back another 13,000 years, another half precessional cycle, to 39,000 years before Herodotus, the vernal sunrise returns to Libra, and Aries is again in opposition.

The point is this: with 39,000 years we have an expanse of time during which the sun can be described as ‘twice rising where he now sets’, i.e. in Libra in the time of Herodotus (and again at 13,000 and at 39,000 years earlier), and as ‘twice setting where he now rises’, i.e. in Aries in the time of Herodotus (and again at 13,000 and 39,000 years earlier).27


27 As the following table makes clear:

If Schwaller’s interpretation is correct—and there is every reason to suppose it is—it suggests that the Greek historian’s priestly informants must have had access to accurate records of the precessional motion of the sun going back at least 39,000 years before their own era.



The Turin Papyrus and the Palermo Stone
The figure of 39,000 years accords surprisingly closely with the testimony of the Turin Papyrus (one of the two surviving Ancient Egyptian king lists that extends back into prehistoric times before the First Dynasty).

Originally in the collection of the king of Sardinia, the brittle and crumbling 3000-year-old papyrus was sent in a box, without packing, to its present home in the Museum of Turin. As any schoolchild could have predicted, it arrived broken into countless fragments. Scholars were obliged to work for years to piece together and make sense of what remained, and they did a superb job.28 Nevertheless, more than half the contents of this precious record proved impossible to reconstruct.29

What might we have learned about the First Time if the Turin Papyrus had remained intact?

The surviving fragments are tantalizing. In one register, for example, we read the names often Neteru with each name inscribed in a cartouche (oblong enclosure) in much the same style adopted in later periods for the historical kings of Egypt. The number of years that each Neter was believed to have reigned was also given, but most of these numbers are missing from the damaged document.30

In another column there appears a list of the mortal kings who ruled in upper and lower Egypt after the gods but prior to the supposed unification of the kingdom under Menes, the first pharaoh of the First Dynasty, in 3100 BC.

From the surviving fragments it is possible to 372 establish that nine ‘dynasties’ of these pre-dynastic pharaohs were mentioned, among which were ‘the Venerables of Memphis’, ‘the Venerables of the North’ and, lastly, the Shemsu Hor (the Companions, or Followers, of Horus) who ruled until the time of Menes.



The final two lines of the column, which seem to represent a summing up or inventory, are particularly provocative. They read:

‘... Venerables Shemsu-Hor, 13,420 years; Reigns before the Shemsu-Hor, 23,200 years; Total 36,620 years’.31

The other king list that deals with prehistoric times is the Palermo Stone, which does not take us as far back into the past as the Turin Papyrus. The earliest of its surviving registers record the reigns of 120 kings who ruled in upper and lower Egypt in the late pre-dynastic period: the centuries immediately prior to the country’s unification in 3100 BC.32



Once again, however, we really have no idea how much other information, perhaps relating to far earlier periods, might originally have been inscribed on this enigmatic slab of black basalt, because it, too, has not come down to us intact. Since 1887 the largest single part has been preserved in the Museum of Palermo in Sicily; a second piece is on display in Egypt in the Cairo Museum; and a third much smaller fragment is in the Petrie Collection at the University of London.33



These are reckoned by archaeologists to have been broken out of the centre of a monolith which would originally have measured about seven feet long by two feet high (stood on its long side).34 Furthermore, as one authority has observed:

It is quite possible—even probable—that many more pieces of this invaluable monument remain, if we only knew where to look. As it is we are faced with the tantalising knowledge that a record of the name of every king of the Archaic Period existed, together with the number of years of his reign and the chief events which occurred during his occupation of the throne. And these events were compiled in the Fifth Dynasty, only about 700 years after the Unification, so that the margin of error would in all probability have been very small ...’35

The late Professor Walter Emery, whose words these are, was naturally concerned about the absence of much-needed details concerning the Archaic Period, 3200 BC to 2900 BC,36 the focus of his own specialist interests. We should also spare a thought, however, for what an intact Palermo Stone might have told us about even earlier epochs, notably Zep Tepi—the golden age of the gods.


28 See, for example, Sir A.H. Gardner, The Royal Cannon of Turin, Griffith Institute, Oxford.

29 Archaic Egypt, p. 4.

30 For further details, Sacred Science, p. 86.

31 Ibid., p. 86. See also Egyptian Mysteries, p. 68.

32 Archaic Egypt, p. 5; Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 200.

33 Archaic Egypt, p. 5; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 9:81.

34 Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 200.

35 Archaic Egypt, p. 5.

36 Egypt to the End of the Old Kingdom, p. 12.

The deeper we penetrate into the myths and memories of Egypt’s long past, and the closer we approach to the fabled First Time, the stranger the landscapes that surround us become ... as we shall see.


Back to Contents





Chapter 44 - Gods of the First Time


According to Heliopolitan theology, the nine original gods who appeared in Egypt in the First Time were Ra, Shu, Tefnut, Geb, Nut, Osiris, Isis, Nepthys and Set. The offspring of these deities included well-known figures such as Horus and Anubis. In addition, other companies of gods were recognized, notably at Memphis and Hermopolis, where there were important and very ancient cults dedicated to Ptah and to Thoth.1



These First Time deities were all in one sense or another gods of creation who had given shape to chaos through their divine will. Out of that chaos they formed and populated the sacred land of Egypt,2 wherein, for many thousands of years, they ruled among men as divine pharaohs.3

What was ‘chaos’?

The Heliopolitan priests who spoke to the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus in the first century BC put forward the thought-provoking suggestion that ‘chaos’ was a flood—identified by Diodorus with the earth-destroying flood of Deucalion, the Greek Noah figure: 4

In general, they say that if in the flood which occurred in the time of Deucalion most living things were destroyed, it is probable that the inhabitants of southern Egypt survived rather than any others ... Or if, as some maintain, the destruction of living things was complete and the earth then brought forth again new forms of animals, nevertheless, even on such a supposition, the first genesis of living things fittingly attaches to this country ...5

Why should Egypt have been so blessed? Diodorus was told that it had something to do with its geographical situation, with the great exposure of its southern regions to the heat of the sun, and with the vastly increased rainfall which the myths said the world had experienced in the aftermath of the universal deluge:

‘For when the moisture from the abundant rains which fell among other peoples was mingled with the intense heat which prevails in Egypt itself ... the air became very well tempered for the first generation of all living things ...’6

1 Kingship and the Gods, pp. 181-2; The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, pp. 209, 264; Egyptian Myths, pp. 18-22. See also T. G. H. James, An Introduction to Ancient Egypt, British Museum Publications, London, 1979, p. 125ff.
2 Cyril Aldred, Akhenaton, Abacus, London, 1968, p. 25: ‘It was believed that the gods had ruled in Egypt after first making it perfect.’
3 Kingship and the Gods, pp. 153-5; Egyptian Myths, pp. 18-22; Egyptian Mysteries, pp. 8-11; New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, pp. 10-28. 4 See Part IV.

5 Diodorus Siculus, volume I, p. 37.

6 Ibid.

Curiously enough, Egypt does enjoy a special geographical situation: as is well known, the latitude and longitude lines which intersect just beside the Great Pyramid (30° north and 31° east) cross more dry land than any others.7



Curiously, too, at the end of the last Ice Age, when millions of square miles of glaciation were melting in northern Europe, when rising sea levels were flooding coastal areas all around the globe, and when the huge volume of extra moisture released into the atmosphere through the evaporation of the ice fields was being dumped as rain, Egypt benefited for several thousands of years from an exceptionally humid and fertile climate.8



It is not difficult to see how such a climate might indeed have been remembered as ‘well tempered for the first generation of all living things’.

The question therefore has to be asked: whose information about the past are we receiving from Diodorus, and is the apparently accurate description of Egypt’s lush climate at the end of the last Ice Age a coincidence, or is an extremely ancient tradition being transmitted to us here—a memory, perhaps, of the First Time?



7 Mystic Places, Time-Life Books, 1987, p. 62.

8 Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt, p. 13; Egypt before the Pharaohs, pp. 27, 261.



Breath of the divine serpent
Ra was believed to have been the first king of the First Time and ancient myths say that as long as he remained young and vigorous he reigned peacefully. The passing years took their toll on him, however, and he is depicted at the end of his rule as an old, wrinkled, stumbling man with a trembling mouth from which saliva ceaselessly dribbles.9

Shu followed Ra as king on earth, but his reign was troubled by plots and conflicts. Although he vanquished his enemies he was in the end so ravaged by disease that even his most faithful followers revolted against him: ‘Weary of reigning, Shu abdicated in favour of his son Geb and took refuge in the skies after a terrifying tempest which lasted nine days ...’10

Geb, the third divine pharaoh, duly succeeded Shu to the throne. His reign was also troubled and some of the myths describing what took place reflect the odd idiom of the Pyramid Texts in which a non-technical vocabulary seems to wrestle with complex technical and scientific imagery.



For example, one particularly striking tradition speaks of a ‘golden box’ in which Ra had deposited a number of objects—described, respectively, as his ‘rod’ (or cane), a lock of his hair, and his uraeus (a rearing cobra with its hood extended, fashioned out of gold, which was worn on the royal head-dress).11



9 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 11.

10 Ibid., p. 13.
11 Ibid., pp. 14-15.

A powerful and dangerous talisman, this box, together with its bizarre contents, remained enclosed in a fortress on the ‘eastern frontier’ of Egypt until a great many years after Ra’s ascent to heaven. When Geb came to power he ordered that it should be brought to him and unsealed in his presence. In the instant that the box was opened a bolt of fire (described as the ‘breath of the divine serpent’) ushered from it, struck dead all Geb’s companions and gravely burned the god-king himself.12

It is tempting to wonder whether what we are confronted by here might not be a garbled account of a malfunctioning man-made device: a confused, awe-stricken recollection of a monstrous instrument devised by the scientists of a lost civilization. Weight is added to such extreme speculations when we remember that this is by no means the only golden box in the ancient world that functioned like a deadly and unpredictable machine.



It has a number of quite unmissable similarities to the Hebrews’ enigmatic Ark of the Covenant (which also struck innocent people dead with bolts of fiery energy, which also was ‘overlaid round about with gold’, and which was said to have contained not only the two tablets of the Ten Commandments but ‘the golden pot that had manna, and Aaron’s rod.’)13

A proper look at the implications of all these weird and wonderful boxes (and of other ‘technological’ artifacts referred to in ancient traditions) is beyond the scope of this book. For our purposes here it is sufficient to note that a peculiar atmosphere of dangerous and quasi-technological wizardry seems to surround many of the gods of the Heliopolitan Ennead.

Isis, for example (wife and sister of Osiris and mother of Horus) carries a strong whiff of the science lab. According to the Chester Beatty Papyrus in the British Museum she was ‘a clever woman ... more intelligent than countless gods ... She was ignorant of nothing in heaven and earth.’14



Renowned for her skilful use of witchcraft and magic, Isis was particularly remembered by the Ancient Egyptians as,

‘strong of tongue’, that is being in command of words of power ‘which she knew with correct pronunciation, and halted not in her speech, and was perfect both in giving the command and in saying the word’.15

In short, she was believed, by means of her voice alone, to be capable of bending reality and overriding the laws of physics.

These same powers, though perhaps in greater degree, were attributed to the wisdom god Thoth who although not a member of the Heliopolitan Ennead is recognized in the Turin Papyrus and other ancient records as the sixth (or sometimes as the seventh) divine pharaoh of Egypt.16

12 Ibid.
13 Hebrews 9:4. For details of the Ark’s baleful powers see Graham Hancock, The Sign and the Seal, Mandarin, London, 1993, Chapter 12, p. 273ff.

14 Cited in Egyptian Myths, p. 44.
15 Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic, Kegan Paul, Trench, London, 1901, p. 5; The Gods of the Egyptians, volume II, p. 214.
16 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 27. If Set’s usurpation is included as a reign, we have seven divine pharaohs up to and including Thoth (i.e., Ra, Shu, Geb, Osiris, Set, Horus, Thoth).


Frequently represented on temple and tomb walls as an ibis, or an ibis-headed man, Thoth was venerated as the regulative force responsible for all heavenly calculations and annotations, as the lord and multiplier of time, the inventor of the alphabet and the patron of magic. He was particularly associated with astronomy, mathematics, surveying and geometry, and was described as ‘he who reckons in heaven, the counter of the stars and the measurer of the earth’.17



He was also regarded as a deity who understood the mysteries of ‘all that is hidden under the heavenly vault’, and who had the ability to bestow wisdom on selected individuals. It was said that he had inscribed his knowledge in secret books and hidden these about the earth, intending that they should be sought for by future generations but found ‘only by the worthy’—who were to use their discoveries for the benefit of mankind.18

What stands out most clearly about Thoth, therefore, in addition to his credentials as an ancient scientist, is his role as a benefactor and civilizer.19 In this respect he closely resembles his predecessor Osiris, the high god of the Pyramid Texts and the fourth divine pharaoh of Egypt,

‘whose name becometh Sah [Orion], whose leg is long, and his stride extended, the President of the Land of the South ...’20


Osiris and the Lords of Eternity
Occasionally referred to in the texts as a neb tem, or ‘universal master’,21 Osiris is depicted as human but also superhuman, suffering but at the same time commanding. Moreover, he expresses his essential dualism by ruling m heaven (as the constellation of Orion) and on earth as a king among men.



Like Viracocha in the Andes and Quetzalcoatl in Central America, his ways are subtle and mysterious. Like them, he is exceptionally tall and always depicted wearing the curved beard of divinity.22



And like them too, although he has supernatural powers at his disposal, he avoids the use of force wherever possible.23


17 The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, p. 400; Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 22-3. see also From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, pp. 121-2; Egyptian Magic, pp. 128-9; New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, pp. 27-8.
18 Manetho, quoted by the neo-Platonist Iamblichus. See Peter Lemesurier, The Great Pyramid Decoded, Element Books, 1989, p. 15; The Egyptian Hermes, p. 33.
19 See, for example, Diodorus Siculus, volume I, p. 53, where Thoth (under his Greek name of Hermes) is described as being ‘endowed with unusual ingenuity for devising things capable of improving the social life of man’.

20 Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume II, p. 307.
21 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, p. 179; New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 16.
22 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, pp. 9-10, 16; Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 44; The Gods of the Egyptians, volume II, pp. 130-1; From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 190; Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, p. 230.

We saw in Chapter Sixteen that Quetzalcoatl, the god-king of the Mexicans, was believed to have departed from Central America by sea, sailing away on a raft of serpents. It is therefore hard to avoid a sense of déjà vu when we read in the Egyptian Book of the Dead that the abode of Osiris also ‘rested on water’ and had walls made of ‘living serpents’.24 At the very least, the convergence of symbolism linking these two gods and two far-flung regions is striking.

There are other obvious parallels as well.

The central details of the story of Osiris have been recounted in earlier chapters and we need not go over them again. The reader will not have forgotten that this god—once again like Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha—was remembered principally as a benefactor of mankind, as a bringer of enlightenment and as a great civilizing leader.25



He was credited, for example, with having abolished cannibalism and was said to have introduced the Egyptians to agriculture—in particular to the cultivation of wheat and barley—and to have taught them the art of fashioning agricultural implements.



Since he had an especial liking for fine wines (the myths do not say where he acquired this taste), he made a point of ‘teaching mankind the culture of the vine, as well as the way to harvest the grape and to store the wine ...’26 In addition to the gifts of good living he brought to his subjects, Osiris helped to wean them ‘from their miserable and barbarous manners’ by providing them with a code of laws and inaugurating the cult of the gods in Egypt.27

When he had set everything in order, he handed over the control of the kingdom to Isis, quit Egypt for many years, and roamed about the world with the sole intention, Diodorus Siculus was told, of visiting all the inhabited earth and teaching the race of men how to cultivate the vine and sow wheat and barley; for he supposed that if he made men give up their savagery and adopt a gentle manner of life he would receive immortal honours because of the magnitude of his benefactions ...28

Osiris travelled first to Ethiopia, where he taught tillage and husbandry to the primitive hunter-gatherers he encountered. He also undertook a number of large-scale engineering and hydraulics works:

‘He built canals, with flood gates and regulators ... he raised the river banks and took precautions to prevent the Nile from overflowing ...’29


Later he made his way to Arabia and thence to India, where he established many cities. Moving on to Thrace he killed a barbarian king for refusing to adopt his system of government. This was out of character; in general, Osiris was remembered by the Egyptians for having forced no man to carry out his instructions, but by means of gentle persuasion and an appeal to their reason he succeeded in inducing them to practice what he preached. Many of his wise counsels were imparted to his listeners in hymns and songs, which were sung to the accompaniment of instruments of music.’ 30

Once again the parallels with Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha are hard to avoid. During a time of darkness and chaos—quite possibly linked to a flood—a bearded god, or man, materializes in Egypt (or Bolivia, or Mexico). He is equipped with a wealth of practical and scientific skills, of the kind associated with mature and highly developed civilizations, which he uses unselfishly for the benefit of humanity.



He is instinctively gentle but capable of great firmness when necessary. He is motivated by a strong sense of purpose and, after establishing his headquarters at Heliopolis (or Tiahuanaco, or Teotihuacan), he sets forth with a select band of companions to impose order and to reinstate the lost balance of the world.31



23 Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 2.

24 Chapter CXXV, cited in ibid., volume II, p. 81.
25 See Parts II and III for Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha. A good summary of Osiris’s civilizing attributes is the New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 16. See also Diodorus Siculus, pp. 47-9; Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, pp. 1-12.

26 Diodorus Siculus, p. 53.

27 Ibid.; Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 2.

28 Diodorus Siculus, p. 55.

29 Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 11.

30 Ibid., p. 2.
31 Ibid., 2-11. For Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha see Parts II and III. Interestingly enough, Osiris was said to have been accompanied on his civilizing mission by two ‘openers of the way’: (Diodorus Siculus page 57), ‘Anubis and Macedo, Anubis wearing a dog’s skin and Macedo the fore-parts of a wolf ...’

Leaving aside for the present the issue of whether we are dealing here with gods or men, with figments of the primitive imagination or with flesh-and-blood beings, the fact remains that the myths always speak of a company of civilizers: Viracocha has his ‘companions’, as have both Quetzalcoatl and Osiris.



Sometimes there are fierce internal conflicts within these groups, and perhaps struggles for power: the battles between Seth and Horus, and between Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl are obvious examples. Moreover, whether the mythical events unfold in Central America, or in the Andes, or in Egypt, the upshot is also always pretty much the same: the civilizer is eventually plotted against and either driven out or killed.

The myths say that Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha never came back (although, as we have seen, their return to the Americas was expected at the time of the Spanish conquest). Osiris, on the other hand, did come back. Although he was murdered by Set soon after the completion of his worldwide mission to make men ‘give up their savagery’, he won eternal life through his resurrection in the constellation of Orion as the all-powerful god of the dead.



Thereafter, judging souls and providing an immortal example of responsible and benevolent kingship, he dominated the religion (and the culture) of Ancient Egypt for the entire span of its known history.


Serene stability
Who can guess what the civilizations of the Andes and of Mexico might have achieved if they too had benefited from such powerful symbolic continuity. In this respect, however, Egypt is unique. Indeed, although the Pyramid Texts and other archaic sources recognize a period of disruption and attempted usurpation by Set (and his seventy-two ‘precessional’ conspirators), they also depict the transition to the reigns of Horus, Thoth and the later divine pharaohs as being relatively smooth and inevitable.

This transition was mimicked, through thousands of years, by the mortal kings of Egypt. From the beginning to the end, they saw themselves as the lineal descendants and living representatives of Horus, son of Osiris. As generation succeeded generation, it was supposed that each deceased pharaoh was reborn in the sky as ‘an Osiris’ and that each successor to the throne became a ‘Horus’.32

This simple, refined, and stable scheme was already fully evolved and in place at the beginning of the First Dynasty—around 3100 BC.33 Scholars accept this; the majority also accept that what we are dealing with here is a highly developed and sophisticated religion.34 Strangely, very few Egyptologists or archaeologists have questioned where and when this religion took shape.

Is it not to defy logic to suppose that well-rounded social and metaphysical ideas like those of the Osiris cult sprung up fully formed in 3100 BC, or that they could have taken such perfect shape in the 300 years which Egyptologists sometimes grudgingly allow for them to have done so?35



There must have been a far longer period of development than that, spread over several thousands rather than several hundreds of years. Moreover, as we have seen, every surviving record in which the Ancient Egyptians speak directly about their past asserts that their civilization was a legacy of ‘the gods’ who were ‘the first to hold sway in Egypt’.36

The records are not internally consistent: some attribute much greater antiquity to the civilization of Egypt than others. All, however, clearly and firmly direct our attention to an epoch far, far in the past—anything from 8000 to almost 40,000 years before the foundation of the First Dynasty.

Archaeologists insist that no material artefacts have ever been found in Egypt to suggest that an evolved civilization existed at such early dates, but this is not strictly true. As we saw in Part VI, a handful of objects and structures exist which have not yet been conclusively dated by any scientific means.

32 Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume II, p. 273. See also in general, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts.

33 Archaic Egypt, p. 122; Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, p. 98.

34 See, in general, Kingship and the Gods; Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection; The Gods of the Egyptians.

35 Archaic Egypt, p. 38.

36 Manetho, p. 5.

The ancient city of Abydos conceals one of the most extraordinary of these undatable enigmas ...


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Chapter 45 - The Works of Men and Gods


Among the numberless ruined temples of Ancient Egypt, there is one that is unique not only for its marvellous state of preservation, which (rare indeed!) includes an intact roof, but for the fine quality of the many acres of beautiful reliefs that decorate its towering walls. Located at Abydos, eight miles west of the present course of the Nile, this is the Temple of Seti I, a monarch of the illustrious nineteenth Dynasty, who ruled from 1306-1290 BC.1

Seti is known primarily as the father of a famous son: Ramesses II (1290-1224 BC), the pharaoh of the biblical Exodus.2 In his own right, however, he was a major historical figure who conducted extensive military campaigns outside Egypt’s borders, who was responsible for the construction of several fine buildings and who carefully and conscientiously refurbished and restored many older ones.3



His temple at Abydos, which was known evocatively as ‘The House of Millions of Years’, was dedicated to Osiris,4 the ‘Lord of Eternity’, of whom it was said in the Pyramid Texts:

You have gone, but you will return, you have slept, but you will awake, you have died, but you will live ... Betake yourself to the waterway, fare upstream ... travel about Abydos in this spirit-form of yours which the gods commanded to belong to you.5

1 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.
2 Dates from Atlas of Ancient Egypt. For further data on Ramesses II as the pharaoh of the exodus see Profuses K. A. Kitchen, Pharaoh Triumphant: The Life and Times of Ramesses II, Aris and Phillips, Warminster, 1982, pp. 70-1.

3 See, for example, A Biographical Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, pp. 135-7.

4 Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 384.

5 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, pp. 285, 253.




Atef Crown
It was eight in the morning, a bright, fresh hour in these latitudes, when I entered the hushed gloom of the Temple of Seti I. Sections of its walls were floor-lit by low-wattage electric bulbs; otherwise the only illumination was that which the pharaoh’s architects had originally planned: a few isolated shafts of sunlight that penetrated through slits in the outer masonry like beams of divine radiance.



Hovering among the motes of dust dancing in those beams, and infiltrating the heavy stillness of the air amid the great columns that held up the roof of the Hypostyle Hall, it was easy to imagine that the spirit-form of Osiris could still be present. Indeed, this was more than just imagination because Osiris was physically present in the astonishing symphony of reliefs that adorned the walls—reliefs that depicted the once and future civilizer-king in his role as god of the dead, enthroned and attended by Isis, his beautiful and mysterious sister.

In these scenes Osiris wore a variety of different and elaborate crowns which I studied closely as I walked from relief to relief. Crowns similar to these in many respects had been important parts of the wardrobe of all the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt, at least on the evidence of reliefs depicting them. Strangely, however, in all the years of intensive excavations, archaeologists had not found a single example of a royal crown, or a small part of one, let alone a specimen of the convoluted ceremonial headdresses associated with the gods of the First Time.6

Of particular interest was the Atef crown. Incorporating the uraeus, the royal serpent symbol (which in Mexico was a rattlesnake but in Egypt was a hooded cobra poised to strike), the central core of this strange contraption was recognizable as an example of the hedjet, the white skittle-shaped war helmet of upper Egypt (again known only from reliefs).

Rearing up on either side of this core were what seemed to be two thin leaves of metal, and at the front was an attached device, consisting of two wavy blades, which scholars normally describe as a pair of rams’ horns.7

Seventeen centuries of kings
I walked on into the deeper darkness, eventually finding my way to the Gallery of the Kings. It led off from the eastern edge of the inner Hypostyle Hall about 200 feet from the entrance to the temple.

To pass through the Gallery was to pass through time itself. On the wall to my left was a list of 120 of the gods of Ancient Egypt, together with the names of their principal sanctuaries. On my right, covering an area of perhaps ten feet by six feet, were the names of the 76 pharaohs who had preceded Seti I to the throne; each name was carved in hieroglyphs inside an oval cartouche.

This tableau was known as the ‘Abydos King List’.

Glowing with colours of molten gold, it was designed to be read from left to right and was divided into five vertical and three horizontal registers. It covered a grand expanse of almost 1700 years, beginning around 3000 BC with the reign of Menes, first king of the First Dynasty, and ending with Seti’s own reign around 1300 BC. At the extreme left stood two figures exquisitely carved in high relief: Seti and his young son, the future Ramesses II.

Hypogeum
Belonging to the same class of historical documents as the Turin Papyrus and the Palermo Stone, the list spoke eloquently of the continuity of tradition. An inherent part of that tradition, was the belief or memory of a First Time, long, long ago, when the gods had ruled in Egypt.

Principal among those gods was Osiris, and it was therefore appropriate that the Gallery of the Kings should provide access to a second corridor, leading to the rear of the temple where a marvellous building was located—one associated with Osiris from the beginning of written records in Egypt9 and described by the Greek geographer Strabo (who visited Abydos in the first century BC) as ‘a remarkable structure built of solid stone ... [containing] a spring which lies at a great depth, so that one descends to it down vaulted galleries made of monoliths of surpassing size and workmanship.



There is a canal leading to the place from the great river ...’10

A few hundred years after Strabo’s visit, when the religion of Ancient Egypt had been supplanted by the new cult of Christianity, the silt of the river and the sands of the desert began to drift into the Osirieon, filling it foot by foot, century by century, until its upright monoliths and huge lintels were buried and forgotten.



And so it remained, out of sight and out of mind, until the beginning of the twentieth century, when the archaeologists Flinders Petrie and Margaret Murray began excavations. In their 1903 season of digging they uncovered parts of a hall and passageway, lying in the desert about 200 feet south-west of the Seti I Temple and built in the recognizable architectural style of the Nineteenth Dynasty.



However, sandwiched between these remains and the rear of the Temple, they also found unmistakable signs that ‘a large underground building’ lay concealed.11

‘This hypogeum’, wrote Margaret Murray, ‘appears to Professor Petrie to be the place that Strabo mentions, usually called Strabo’s Well.’12

This was good guesswork on the part of Petrie and Murray. Shortage of cash, however, meant that their theory of a buried building was not tested until the digging season of 1912-13. Then, under the direction of Professor Naville of the Egypt Exploration Fund, a long transverse chamber was cleared, at the end of which, to the north-east, was found a massive stone gateway made up of cyclopean blocks of granite and sandstone.

The next season, 1913-14, Naville and his team returned with 600 local helpers and diligently cleared the whole of the huge underground building:

What we discovered [Naville wrote] is a gigantic construction of about 100 feet in length and 60 in width, built with the most enormous stones that may be seen in Egypt. In the four sides of the enclosure walls are cells, 17 in number, of the height of a man and without ornamentation of any kind.



The building itself is divided into three naves, the middle one being wider than those of the sides; the division is produced by two colonnades made of huge granite monoliths supporting architraves of equal size.13

9 See Henry Frankfort, The Cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos, 39th Memoir of the Egypt Exploration Society, London, 1933, p. 25.

10 The Geography of Strabo, volume VIII, pp. 111-13.
11 Margaret A. Murray, The Osireion at Abydos, Egyptian Research Account, ninth year (1903), Bernard Quaritch, London, 1904, p. 2.

12 Ibid.

13 The Times, London, 17 March 1914.

Naville commented with some astonishment on one block he measured in the corner of the building’s northern nave, a block more than twenty-five feet long.14 Equally surprising was the fact that the cells cut into the enclosure walls had no floors, but turned out, as the excavations went deeper, to be filled with increasingly moist sand and earth:

The cells are connected by a narrow ledge between two and three feet wide; there is a ledge also on the opposite side of the nave, but no floor at all, and in digging to a depth of 12 feet we reached infiltrated water. Even below the great gateway there is no floor, and when there was water in front of it the cells were probably reached with a small boat.15

14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.





The most ancient stone building in Egypt
Water, water, everywhere—this seemed to be the theme of the Osireion, which lay at the bottom of the huge crater Naville and his men had excavated in 1914. It was positioned some 50 feet below the level of the floor of the Seti I Temple, almost flush with the water-table, and was approached by a modern stairway curving down to the south-east. Having descended this stairway, I passed under the hulking lintel slabs of the great gateway Naville (and Strabo) had described and crossed a narrow wooden footbridge—again modern—which brought me to a large sandstone plinth.

Measuring about 80 feet in length by 40 in width, this plinth was composed of enormous paving blocks and was entirely surrounded by water. Two pools, one rectangular and the other square, had been cut into the plinth along the centre of its long axis and at either end stairways led down to a depth of about 12 feet below the water level.



The plinth also supported the two massive colonnades Naville mentioned in his report, each of which consisted of five chunky rose-coloured granite monoliths about eight feet square by 12 feet high and weighing, on average, around 100 tons.16 The tops of these huge columns were spanned by granite lintels and there was evidence that the whole building had once been roofed over with a series of even larger monolithic slabs.17

16 Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 391. 17 The Cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos, p. 18.

Plan of the Osireion.


To get a proper understanding of the structure of the Osireion, I found it helpful to raise myself directly above it in my mind’s eye, so that I could look down on it. This exercise was assisted by the absence of the original roof which made it easier to envisage the whole edifice in plan. Also helpful was the fact that water had now seeped up to fill all of the building’s pools, cells and channels to a depth of a few inches below the lip of the central plinth, as the original designers had apparently intended it should.18

Looking down in this manner, it was immediately apparent that the plinth formed a rectangular island, surrounded on all four sides by a water-filled moat about 10 feet wide. The moat was contained by an immense, rectangular enclosure wall, no less than 20 feet thick,19 made of very large blocks of red sandstone disposed in polygonal jigsaw-puzzle patterns. Into the huge thickness of this wall were set the 17 cells mentioned in Naville’s report. Six lay to the east, six to the west, two to the south and three to the north.

Off the central of the three northern cells lay a long transverse chamber, roofed with and composed of limestone. A similar transverse chamber, also of limestone but no longer with an intact roof, lay immediately south of the great gateway. Finally, the whole structure was enclosed within an outer wall of limestone, thus completing a sequence of inter-nested rectangles, i.e., from the outside in, wall, wall, moat, plinth.

Another notable and outstandingly unusual feature of the Osireion was that it was not even approximately aligned to the cardinal points. Instead, like the Way of the Dead at Teotihuacan in Mexico, it was oriented to the east of due north. Since Ancient Egypt had been a civilization that could and normally did achieve precise alignments for its buildings, it seemed to me improbable that this apparently skewed orientation was accidental. Moreover, although 50 feet higher, the Seti I Temple was oriented along exactly the same axis—and again not by accident.



The question was: which was the older building? Had the axis of the Osireion been predetermined by the axis of the Temple or vice versa? This, it turned out, was an issue over which considerable controversy, now long forgotten, had once raged. In a debate which had many connections with that surrounding the Sphinx and the Valley Temple at Giza, eminent archaeologists had initially argued that the Osireion was a building of truly immense antiquity, a view expressed by Professor Naville in the London Times of 17 March 1914:

This monument raises several important questions. As to its date, its great similarity with the Temple of the Sphinx [as the Valley Temple was then known] shows it to be of the same epoch when building was made with enormous stones without any ornament. This is characteristic of the oldest architecture in Egypt. I should even say that we may call it the most ancient stone building in Egypt.20

18 Ibid., p. 28-9.
19 E. Naville, ‘Excavations at Abydos: The Great Pool and the Tomb of Osiris’, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, volume I, 1914, p. 160.

20 The Times, London, 17 March 1914.

Describing himself as overawed by the ‘grandeur and stern simplicity’ of the monument’s central hall, with its remarkable granite monoliths, and by ‘the power of those ancients who could bring from a distance and move such gigantic blocks’, Naville made a suggestion concerning the function the Osireion might originally have been intended to serve:

‘Evidently this huge construction was a large reservoir where water was stored during the high Nile ... It is curious that what we may consider as a beginning in architecture is neither a temple nor a tomb, but a gigantic pool, a waterwork ...21

21 Ibid.

Curious indeed, and well worth investigating further; something Naville hoped to do the following season. Unfortunately, the First World War intervened and no archaeology could be undertaken in Egypt for several years. As a result, it was not until 1925 that the Egypt Exploration Fund was able to send out another mission, which was led not by Naville but by a young Egyptologist named Henry Frankfort.


Frankfort’s facts
Later to enjoy great prestige and influence as professor of Pre-Classical Antiquity at the University of London, Frankfort spent several consecutive digging seasons re-clearing and thoroughly excavating the Osireion between 1925 and 1930. During the course of this work he made discoveries which, so far as he was concerned, ‘settled the date of the building’:

1 - A granite dovetail in position at the top of the southern side of the main entrance to the central hall, which was inscribed with the cartouche of Seti I.

2 - A similar dovetail in position inside the eastern wall of the central hall.

3 - Astronomical scenes and inscriptions by Seti I carved in relief on the ceiling of the northern transverse chamber.

4 - The remains of similar scenes in the southern transverse chamber.

5 - An ostracon (piece of broken potsherd) found in the entrance passage and bearing the legend ‘Seti is serviceable to Osiris’.22

The reader will recall the lemming behaviour which led to a dramatic change of scholarly opinion about the antiquity of the Sphinx and the Valley Temple (due to the discovery of a few statues and a single cartouche which seemed to imply some sort of connection with Khafre).



Frankfort’s finds at Abydos caused a similar volte-face over the antiquity of the Osireion. In 1914 it was ‘the most ancient stone building in Egypt’. By 1933, it had been beamed forward in time to the reign of Seti I— around 1300 BC—whose cenotaph it was now believed to be.23



22 The Cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos, pp. 4, 25, 68-80.

23 Ibid., in general.

Within a decade, the standard Egyptological texts began to print the attribution to Seti I as though it were a fact, verifiable by experience or observation. It is not a fact, however, merely Frankfort’s interpretation of the evidence he had found.

The only facts are that certain inscriptions and decorations left by Seti appear in an otherwise completely anonymous structure. One plausible explanation is that the structure must have been built by Seti, as Frankfort proposed. The other possibility is that the half-hearted and scanty decorations, cartouches and inscriptions found by Frankfort could have been placed in the Osireion as part of a renovation and repair operation undertaken in Seti’s time (implying that the structure was by then ancient, as Naville and others had proposed).

What are the merits of these mutually contradictory propositions which identify the Osireion as (a) the oldest building in Egypt, and (b) a relatively late New Kingdom structure?

Proposition (b)—that it is the cenotaph of Seti I—is the only attribution accepted by Egyptologists. On close inspection, however, it rests on the circumstantial evidence of the cartouches and inscriptions which prove nothing. Indeed part of this evidence appears to contradict Frankfort’s case. The ostracon bearing the legend ‘Seti is serviceable to Osiris’ sounds less like praise for the works of an original builder than praise for a restorer who had renovated, and perhaps added to, an ancient structure identified with the First Time god Osiris.



And another awkward little matter has also been overlooked. The south and north ‘transverse chambers’, which contain Seti I’s detailed decorations and inscriptions, lie outside the twenty-foot-thick enclosure wall which so adamantly defines the huge, undecorated megalithic core of the building. This had raised the reasonable suspicion in Naville’s mind (though Frankfort chose to ignore it) that the two chambers concerned were ‘not contemporaneous with the rest of the building’ but had been added much later during the reign of Seti I, ‘probably when he built his own temple’.24

To cut a long story short, therefore, everything about proposition (b) is based in one way or another on Frankfort’s not necessarily infallible interpretation of various bits and pieces of possibly intrusive evidence.

Proposition (a)—that the core edifice of the Osireion had been built millennia before Seti’s time—rests on the nature of the architecture itself. As Naville observed, the Osireion’s similarity to the Valley Temple at Giza ‘showed it to be of the same epoch when building was made with enormous stones’.



Likewise, until the end of her life, Margaret Murray remained convinced that the Osireion was not a cenotaph at all (least of all Seti’s). She said,

It was made for the celebration of the mysteries of Osiris, and so far is unique among all the surviving buildings of Egypt. It is clearly early, for the great blocks of which it is built are of the style of the Old Kingdom; the simplicity of the actual building also points to it being of that early date. The decoration was added by Seti I, who in that way laid claim to the building, but seeing how often a Pharaoh claimed the work of his predecessors by putting his name on it, this fact does not carry much weight. It is the style of the building, the type of the masonry, the tooling of the stone, and not the name of a king, which date a building in Egypt.25

This was an admonition Frankfort might well have paid more attention to, for as he bemusedly observed of his ‘cenotaph’, ‘It has to be admitted that no similar building is known from the Nineteenth Dynasty.’26

24 ‘Excavations at Abydos’, pp. 164-5.

25 The Splendour that was Egypt, pp. 160-1.

26 The Cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos, p. 23.


Indeed it is not just a matter of the Nineteenth Dynasty. Apart from the Valley Temple and other Cyclopean edifices on the Giza plateau, no other building remotely resembling the Osireion is known from any other epoch of Egypt’s long history. This handful of supposedly Old Kingdom structures, built out of giant megaliths, seems to belong in a unique category.



They resemble one another much more than they resemble any other known style of architecture and in all cases there are question-marks over their identity.

Isn’t this precisely what one would expect of buildings not erected by any historical pharaoh but dating back to prehistoric times?

Doesn’t it make sense of the mysterious way in which the Sphinx and the Valley Temple, and now the Osireion as well, seem to have become vaguely connected with the names of particular pharaohs (Khafre and Seti I), without ever yielding a single piece of evidence that clearly and unequivocally proves those pharaohs built the structures concerned?

Aren’t the tenuous links much more indicative of the work of restorers seeking to attach themselves to ancient and venerable monuments than of the original architects of those monuments—whoever they might have been and in whatever epoch they might have lived?


Setting sail across seas of sand and time
Before leaving Abydos, there was one other puzzle that I wanted to remind myself of. It lay buried in the desert, about a kilometer north-west of the Osireion, across sands littered with the rolling, cluttered tumuli of ancient graveyards.

Out among these cemeteries, many of which dated back to early dynastic and pre-dynastic times, the jackal gods Anubis and Upuaut had traditionally reigned supreme. Openers of the way, guardians of the spirits of the dead, I knew that they had played a central role in the mysteries of Osiris that had been enacted each year at Abydos— apparently throughout the span of Ancient Egyptian history.

It seemed to me that there was a sense in which they guarded the mysteries still. For what was the Osireion if was not a huge, unsolved mystery that deserved closer scrutiny than it has received from the scholars whose job it is to look into these matters? And what was the burial in the desert of twelve high-prowed, seagoing ships if not also a mystery that cried out, loudly, for solution?

It was the burial place of those ships I was now crossing the cemeteries of the jackal gods to see:

The Guardian, London, 21 December 1991:

A fleet of 5000-year-old royal ships has been found buried eight miles from the Nile. American and Egyptian archaeologists discovered the 12 large wooden boats at Abydos ... Experts said the boats—which are 50 to 60 feet long—are about 5000 years old, making them Egypt’s earliest royal ships and among the earliest boats found anywhere ...



The experts say the ships, discovered in September, were probably meant for burial so the souls of the pharaohs could be transported on them. ‘We never expected to find such a fleet, especially so far from the Nile,’ said David O’Connor, the expedition leader and curator of the Egyptian Section of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania ...27



The boats were buried in the shadow of a gigantic mud-brick enclosure, thought to have been the mortuary temple of a Second Dynasty pharaoh named Khasekhemwy, who had ruled Egypt in the twenty-seventh century BC.28 O’Connor, however, was certain that they were not associated directly with Khasekhemwy but rather with the nearby (and largely ruined) ‘funerary-cult enclosure built for Pharaoh Djer early in Dynasty I. The boat graves are not likely to be earlier than this and may in fact have been built for Djer, but this remains to be proven.’29

A sudden strong gust of wind blew across the desert, scattering sheets of sand. I took refuge for a while in the lee of the looming walls of the Khasekhemwy enclosure, close to the point where the University of Pennsylvania archaeologists had, for legitimate security reasons, reburied the twelve mysterious boats they had stumbled on in 1991. They had hoped to return in 1992 to continue the excavations, but there had been various hitches and, in 1993, the dig was still being postponed.

In the course of my research O’Connor had sent me the official report of the 1991 season,30 mentioning in passing that some of the boats might have been as much as 72 feet in length.31



He also noted that the boat-shaped brick graves in which they were enclosed, which would have risen well above the level of the surrounding desert in early dynastic times, must have produced quite an extraordinary effect when they were new:

Each grave had originally been thickly coated with mud plaster and whitewash so the impression would have been of twelve (or more) huge ‘boats’ moored out in the desert, gleaming brilliantly in the Egyptian sun. The notion of their being moored was taken so seriously that an irregularly shaped small boulder was found placed near the ‘prow’ or ‘stern’ of several boat graves. These boulders could not have been there naturally or by accident; their placement seems deliberate, not random. We can think of them as ‘anchors’ intended to help ‘moor’ the boats.32

Like the 140-foot ocean-going vessel found buried beside the Great Pyramid at Giza (see Chapter Thirty-three), one thing was immediately clear about the Abydos boats—they were of an advanced design capable of riding out the most powerful waves and the worst weather of the open seas.



According to Cheryl Haldane, a nautical archaeologist at Texas A-and-M University, they showed ‘a high degree of technology combined with grace’.33



27 Guardian, London, 21 December 1991.
28 David O’Connor, ‘Boat Graves and Pyramid Origins’, in Expedition, volume 33, No. 3, 1991, p. 7ff.

29 Ibid., pp. 9-10.

30 Sent to me by fax 27 January 1993.

31 David O’Connor, ‘Boat Graves and Pyramid Origins’, p. 12.

32 Ibid., p. 11-12.

33 Guardian, 21 December 1991.


Exactly as was the case with the Pyramid boat, therefore (but at least 500 years earlier) the Abydos fleet seemed to indicate that a people able to draw upon the accumulated experiences of a long tradition of seafaring had been present in Egypt from the very beginning of its 3000 year history.



Moreover I knew that the earliest wall paintings found in the Nile Valley, dating back perhaps as much as 1500 years before the burial of the Abydos fleet (to around 4500 BC) showed the same long, sleek, high-prowed vessels in action.34

Could an experienced race of ancient seafarers have become involved with the indigenous inhabitants of the Nile Valley at some indeterminate period before the official beginning of history at around 3000 BC? Wouldn’t this explain Egypt’s curious and paradoxical—but nonetheless enduring—obsession with ships in the desert (and references to what sounded like sophisticated ships in the Pyramid Texts, including one said to have been more than 2000 feet long)?35



34 See Cairo Museum, Gallery 54, wall-painting of ships from Badarian period c. 4500 BC.
35 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 192, Utt. 519: ‘O Morning Star, Horus of the Netherworld ... you having a soul and appearing in front of your boat of 770 cubits ... Take me with you in the cabin of your boat.’

In raising these conjectures, I did not doubt that religious symbolism had existed in Ancient Egypt in which, as scholars endlessly pointed out, ships had been designated as vessels for the pharaoh’s soul. Nevertheless that symbolism did not solve the problem posed by the high level of technological achievement of the buried ships; such evolved and sophisticated designs called for a long period of development.



Wasn’t it worth looking into the possibility—even if only to rule it out—that the Giza and Abydos vessels could have been parts of a cultural legacy, not of a land-loving, riverside-dwelling, agricultural people like the indigenous Ancient Egyptians but of an advanced seafaring nation?

Such seafarers could have been expected to be navigators who would have known how to set a course by the stars and who would perhaps also have developed the skills necessary to draw up accurate maps and charts of the oceans they had traversed.

Might they also have been architects and stonemasons whose characteristic medium had been polygonal, megalithic blocks like those of the Valley Temple and the Osireion?

And might they have been associated in some way with the legendary gods of the First Time, said to have brought to Egypt not only civilization and astronomy and architecture, and the knowledge of mathematics and writing, but a host of other useful skills and gifts, by far the most notable and the most significant of which had been the gift of agriculture?

There is evidence of an astonishingly early period of agricultural advance and experimentation in the Nile Valley at about the end of the last Ice Age in the northern hemisphere. The characteristics of this great Egyptian ‘leap forward’ suggest that it could only have resulted from an influx of new ideas from some as yet unidentified source.

Chapter 46 - The Eleventh Millennium BC


If it were not for the powerful mythology of Osiris, and if this civilizing, scientific, law-making deity was not remembered in particular for having introduced domesticated crops into the Nile Valley in the remote and fabled epoch known as the First Time, it would probably not be a matter of any great interest that at some point between 13,000 BC and 10,000 BC Egypt enjoyed a period of what has been described as ‘precocious agricultural development’—possibly the earliest agricultural revolution anywhere in the world identified with certainty by historians.1

As we saw in recent chapters, sources such as the Palermo Stone, Manetho and the Turin Papyrus contain several different and at times contradictory chronologies. All these chronologies nevertheless agree on a very ancient date for the First Time of Osiris: the golden age when the gods were believed to have ruled in Egypt.



In addition, the sources demonstrate a striking convergence over the importance they accord to the eleventh millennium BC in particular,2 the precessional Age of Leo when the great ice sheets of the northern hemisphere were undergoing their final, ferocious meltdown.

Perhaps coincidentally, evidence unearthed since the 1970s by geologists, archaeologists and prehistorians like Michael Hoffman, Fekri Hassan and Professor Fred Wendorff has confirmed that the eleventh millennium BC was indeed an important period in Egyptian prehistory, during which immense and devastating floods swept repeatedly down the Nile Valley.3



Fekri Hassan has speculated that this prolonged series of natural disasters, which reached a crescendo around or just after 10,500 BC (and continued to recur periodically until about 9000 BC) might have been responsible for snuffing out the early agricultural experiment.4

At any rate, that experiment did come to an end (for whatever reason), and appears not to have been attempted again for at least another 5000 years.5

1 Egypt before the Pharaohs., pp. 29, 88.
2 To give yet another example, here is Diodorus Siculus (first century BC) passing on what he was told by Egyptian priests: ‘The number of years from Osiris and Isis, they say, to the reign of Alexander, who founded the city which bears his name in Egypt [fourth century BC], is over ten thousand ...’ Diodorus Siculus, volume I, p. 73.

3 Egypt before The Pharaohs, p. 85.

4 Ibid., p. 90.

5 A History of Ancient Egypt, p. 21.



Kick-start
There is something mysterious about Egypt’s so-called ‘palaeolithic agricultural revolution’. Here, quoted from the standard texts (Hoffman’s Egypt before The Pharaohs and Wendorff and Schild’s Prehistory of the Nile Valley) are some key facts from the little that is known about this great leap forward that occurred so inexplicably towards the end of the last Ice Age:

1 - ‘Shortly after 13,000 BC, grinding stones and sickle blades with a glossy sheen on their bits (the result of silica from cut stems adhering to a sickle’s cutting edge) appear in late Palaeolithic tool kits ... It is clear that the grinding stones were used in preparing plant food.’6

2 - At many riverside sites, at exactly this time, fish stopped being a significant food source and became a negligible one, as evidenced by the absence of fish remains:

‘The decline in fishing as a source of food is related to the appearance of a new food resource represented by ground grain. The associated pollen strongly suggests that this grain was barley, and significantly, this large grass-pollen, tentatively identified as barley, makes a sudden appearance in the pollen profile just before the time when the first settlements were established in this area ...’7

3 - ‘As apparently spectacular as the rise of protoagriculture in the late Palaeolithic Nile Valley was its precipitous decline. No one knows exactly why, but after about 10,500 BC the early sickle blades and grinding disappear to be replaced throughout Egypt by Epipalaeolithic hunting, fishing and gathering peoples who use stone tools.’8

6 Egypt before The Pharaohs, p. 88.
7 Fred Wendorff and Romuald Schild, Prehistory of the Nile Valley, Academic Press, New York, 1976, p. 291.

8 Egypt before the Pharaohs, pp. 89-90.



Scanty though the evidence may be, it is clear in its general implications: Egypt enjoyed a golden age of agricultural plenty which began around 13,000 BC and was brought to an abrupt halt around the middle of the eleventh millennium BC. A kick-start to the process appears to have been given by the introduction of already domesticated barley into the Nile Valley, immediately followed by the establishment of a number of farming settlements which exploited the new resource.



The settlements were equipped with simple but extremely effective agricultural tools and accessories. After the eleventh millennium BC, however, there was a prolonged relapse to more primitive ways of life.

The imagination is inclined to roam freely over such data in search of an explanation—and all such explanations can only be guesswork. What is certain is that the none of the evidence suggests that palaeolithic Egypt’s ‘agricultural revolution’ could have been a local initiative. On the contrary it feels in every way like a transplant.



A transplant appears suddenly, after all, and can be rejected equally fast if conditions change, just as settled agriculture seems to have been rejected in ancient Egypt after the great Nile floods of the eleventh millennium BC.



Climate Change
What was the weather like then?

We’ve noted in earlier chapters that the Sahara, a relatively young desert, was green savannah until about the tenth millennium BC; this savannah, brightened by lakes, boiling with game, extended across much of upper Egypt. Farther north, the Delta area was marshy but dotted with many large and fertile islands.



Overall the climate was significantly cooler, cloudier and rainier than it is today.9 Indeed, for two or three thousand years before and about a thousand years after 10,500 BC it rained and rained and rained. Then, as though marking an ecological turning-point, the floods came. When they were over, increasingly arid conditions set in.10



This period of desiccation lasted until approximately 7000 BC when the ‘Neolithic Subpluvial’ began with a thousand years of heavy rains, followed by 3000 years of moderate rainfall which once again proved ideal for agriculture:

‘For a time the deserts bloomed and human societies colonized areas that have been unable to support such dense populations since.’11

9 Ibid., p. 86.

10 Ibid., pp. 97-8.

11 Ibid., p. 161.

By the birth of dynastic Egypt around 3000 BC, however, the climate had turned around again and a new period of desiccation had begun—one that has continued until the present day.

This, then, in broad outline, is the environmental stage upon which the mysteries of Egyptian civilization have been played out: rain and floods between 13,000 BC and 9500 BC; a dry period until 7000 BC; rain again (though increasingly less frequent) until about 3000 BC; thereafter a renewed and enduring dry period.

The expanse of years is great, but if one is looking for a First Time within it which might accord with the golden age of the gods, one’s thoughts turn naturally to the mysterious epoch of early agricultural experimentation that shadowed the great rains and floods between 13,000 BC and 10,500 BC.


Unseen connections?
This epoch was crucial not only for the Ancient Egyptians but for many peoples in other areas. Indeed, as we saw in Part IV, it was the epoch of dramatic climate shifts, rapidly rising sea levels, earth movements, floods, volcanic eruptions, bituminous rains and darkened skies that was the most probable source of many of the great worldwide myths of universal cataclysm.

Could it also have been an epoch in which ‘gods’ really did walk among men, as the legends said?

On the Bolivian Altiplano those gods were known as the Viracochas and were linked to the astonishing megalithic city of Tiahuanaco, which may have pre-existed the immense floods in the Andes in the eleventh millennium BC. Thereafter, according to Professor Arthur Posnansky, though the flood-waters subsided,

‘the culture of the Altiplano did not again attain a high point of development but rather fell into a total and definitive decadence.’12

Of course, Posnansky’s conclusions are controversial and must be evaluated on their own merits. Nevertheless, it is interesting that both the Bolivian Altiplano and Egypt should have been scoured by immense floods in the eleventh millennium BC. In both areas too, there are signs that extraordinarily early agricultural experiments—apparently based on introduced techniques—were attempted and then abandoned.13



And in both areas important question-marks have been raised over the dating of monuments: the Puma Punku and the Kalasasaya in Tiahuanaco, for example, which Posnansky argued might have been built as early as 15,000 BC,14 and, in Egypt, megalithic structures like the Osireion, the Great Sphinx and the Valley Temple of Khafre at Giza, which John West and the Boston University geologist Robert Schoch have dated on geological grounds to earlier than 10,000 BC.


Could there be an unseen connection linking all these beautiful, enigmatic monuments, the anomalous agricultural experiments of 13,000-10,000 BC, and the legends of civilizer gods like Osiris and Viracocha?



12 See Chapter Twelve.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.



‘Where is the rest of this civilization?’
As we set out on the road from Abydos to Luxor, where we were to meet John Anthony West, I realized that there was a sense in which all the connections would look after themselves if the central issue of the antiquity of the monuments could be settled. In other words, if West’s geological evidence proved that the Sphinx was more than 12,000 years old, the history of human civilization was going to have to be rewritten.



As part of that exciting process, all the other strange, anachronistic ‘fingerprints of the gods’ that kept appearing around the world, and the sense of an undercurrent of ancient connections linking apparently unrelated civilizations, would begin to make sense ...

When West’s evidence was presented in 1992 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science it had been taken seriously enough to be publicly debated by the Chicago University Egyptologist Mark Lehner, director of the Giza Mapping Project, who—to the astonishment of almost everybody present—had been unable to come up with a convincing refutation.

‘When you say something as complex as the Sphinx dates to 9000 or 10,000 BC,’ Lehner had concluded, it implies, of course, that there was a very high civilization that was capable of producing the Sphinx at that period. The question an archaeologist has to ask, therefore, is this: if the Sphinx was made at that time then where is the rest of this civilization, where is the rest of this culture?15

15 AAAS Annual Meeting, 1992, Debate: How Old is the Sphinx?


Lehner, however, was missing the point.

If the Sphinx did date to 9000 or 10,000 BC, the onus was not on West to produce other evidence for the existence of the civilization which produced it, but on Egyptologists and archaeologists to explain how they had got things so wrong, so consistently, for so long. So could West prove the antiquity of the Sphinx?


Back to Contents





Chapter 47 - Sphinx

‘Egyptologists,’ said John West, ‘are the last people in the world to address any anomaly.’

Of course, there are many anomalies in Egypt. The one West was referring to at that moment, however, was the anomaly of the Fourth Dynasty pyramids: an anomaly because of what had happened during the Third, Fifth and Sixth Dynasties. Zoser’s Step Pyramid at Saqqara (Third Dynasty) was an imposing edifice, but it was built with relatively small, manageable blocks that five or six men working together could carry, and its internal chambers were structurally unsound.



The pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties (although adorned inside with the beautiful Pyramid Texts) were so poorly built and had collapsed so completely that today most of them amount to little more than mounds of rubble. The Fourth Dynasty pyramids at Giza, however, were wonderfully well made and had endured the passage of thousands of years more or less intact.

It was this sequence of events, or rather its implications, that West felt Egyptologists should have paid more attention to:

‘There’s a discrepancy in the scenario that reads “building kind of rubbishy pyramids that are structurally unsound, suddenly building absolutely unbelievable pyramids that are structurally the most incredible things ever conceived of, and then immediately afterwards going back to structurally unsound pyramids.”



It doesn’t make sense ... The parallel scenario in, say, the auto-industry would be inventing and building the Model-T Ford, then suddenly inventing and building the ’93 Porsche and making a few of those, then forgetting how to do that and going back to building Model-T Fords again ... Civilizations don’t work this way.’

‘So what are you saying?’ I asked. ‘Are you saying that the Fourth Dynasty pyramids weren’t built by the Fourth Dynasty at all?’

‘My gut feeling is that they weren’t. They don’t look like the mastabas in front of them. They don’t look like any other Fourth Dynasty stuff either ... They don’t seem to fit in ...’

‘And nor does the Sphinx?’

‘And nor does the Sphinx. But the big difference is that we don’t have to rely on gut feelings where the Sphinx is concerned. We can prove that it was built long before the Fourth Dynasty ...’



John West
Santha and I had been fans of John Anthony West ever since we had first started travelling in Egypt. His guide-book, The Traveller’s Key had been a brilliant and indispensable introduction to the mysteries of this ancient land, and we still carried it with us.



At the same time his scholarly works, notably Serpent in the Sky, had opened our eyes to the revolutionary possibility that Egyptian civilization—with its manifold glimpses of high science apparently out of place in time—might not have developed entirely within the confines of the Nile Valley but might have been a legacy of some earlier, greater and as yet unidentified civilization ‘antedating dynastic Egypt, and all other known civilizations, by millennia’.1

Tall and strongly built, West was in his early sixties. He had cultivated a neatly trimmed white beard, was dressed in a khaki safari-suit and wore an eccentric nineteenth-century pith helmet. His manner was youthful and energetic and there was a roguish sparkle in his eyes.

The three of us were sitting on the open upper deck of a Nile cruiser, moored off the corniche in Luxor just a few yards downstream from the Winter Palace Hotel. To our west, across the river, a big red sun, distorted by atmospheric refraction, was setting behind the cliffs of the Valley of the Kings. To our east lay the battered but noble ruins of the Luxor and Karnak temples. Beneath us, transmitted through the hull of the boat, we could feel the lap and flow of the water as it rolled by on its meridional course towards the far-off Delta.

West had first presented his thesis for an older Sphinx in Serpent in the Sky, a comprehensive exposition of the work of the French mathematician R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz. Schwaller’s research at the Luxor Temple between 1937 and 1952 had unearthed mathematical evidence which suggested that Egyptian science and culture had been far more advanced and sophisticated than modern scholars had appreciated.



However, as West put it, this evidence had been set out in ‘abstruse, complex and uncompromising language ... Few readers seem comfortable with raw Schwaller. It’s a bit like trying to wade directly into high energy physics without extensive prior training.’

Schwaller’s principal publications, both originally in French, were the massive three-volume Temple de l’Homme, which focused on Luxor, and the more general Roi de la théocratie Pharaonique. In this latter work, subsequently translated into English as Sacred Science, Schwaller made a passing reference to the tremendous floods and rains which devastated Egypt in the eleventh millennium BC.



Almost as an afterthought, he added:

A great civilization must have preceded the vast movements of water that passed over Egypt, which leads us to assume that the Sphinx already existed, sculptured in the rock of the west cliff at Giza—that Sphinx whose leonine body, except for the head, shows indisputable signs of water erosion.’2

1 Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt; Serpent in the Sky, p. 20.

2 Sacred Science, p. 96.

While working on Serpent, West was struck by the possible significance of this remark and decided to follow it up:

‘I realized that if I could prove Schwaller’s offhand observation empirically, this would be ironclad evidence for the existence of a previously unidentified high civilization of distant antiquity.’

‘Why?’

‘Once you’ve established that water was the agent that eroded the Sphinx the answer is almost childishly simple. It can be explained to anybody who reads the National Enquirer or the News of the World. It’s almost moronically simple ... The Sphinx is supposed to have been built by Khafre around 2500 BC, but since the beginning of dynastic times—say 3000 BC onwards—there just hasn’t been enough rain on the Giza plateau to have caused the very extensive erosion that we see all over the Sphinx’s body.



You really have to go back to before 10,000 BC to find a wet enough climate in Egypt to account for weathering of this type and on this scale. It therefore follows that the Sphinx must have been built before 10,000 BC and since it’s a massive, sophisticated work of art it also follows that it must have been built by a high civilization.’

‘But John,’ Santha asked, ‘how can you be so sure that the weathering was caused by rain water? Couldn’t the desert winds have done the job just as well? After all even orthodox Egyptologists admit that the Sphinx has existed for nearly 5000 years. Isn’t that long enough for these effects to have been caused by wind erosion?’

‘Naturally that was one of the first possibilities that I had to exclude. Only if I could show that wind-borne abrasive sand couldn’t possibly have brought the Sphinx to its present condition would there be any point in looking further into the implications of water erosion.’


Robert Schoch’s geology: Unriddling the Sphinx
A key issue turned out to be the deep trench that the monument was surrounded by on all sides:

‘Because the Sphinx is set in a hollow,’ West explained, ‘sand piles up to its neck within a few decades if it’s left untended ... It has been left untended often during historical times. In fact through a combination of textual references and historical extrapolations it’s possible to prove that during the 4500 years that have elapsed since it was ostensibly built by Khafre it’s been buried to its neck for as much as 3300 years.3


3 West’s detailed evidence is set out in Serpent in the Sky, pp. 184-20. Concerning the covering of the Sphinx by sand he arrives at the following table:





That means that in all this time there has only been a cumulative total of just over 1000 years in which its body has been susceptible to wind-erosion; all the rest of the time it’s been protected from the desert winds by an enormous blanket of sand.



The point is that if the Sphinx was really built by Khafre in the Old Kingdom, and if wind erosion was capable of inflicting such damage on it in so short a time-span, then other Old Kingdom structures in the area, built out of the same limestone, ought to show similar weathering. But none do—you know, absolutely unmistakable Old Kingdom tombs, full of hieroglyphs and inscriptions—none of them show the same type of weathering as the Sphinx.’

Indeed, none did.



Professor Robert Schoch, a Boston University geologist and specialist in rock erosion who had played a key role in validating West’s evidence, was satisfied as to the reason for this. The weathering of the Sphinx—and of the walls of its surrounding rock-hewn enclosure—had not been caused by wind-scouring at all but by thousands of years of heavy rainfall long ages before the Old Kingdom came into being.

Having won over his professional peers at the 1992 Convention of the Geological Society of America,4 Schoch went on to explain his findings to a much wider and more eclectic audience (including Egyptologists) at the 1992 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).



He began by pointing out to delegates that,

‘the body of the Sphinx and the walls of the Sphinx ditch are deeply weathered and eroded ... This erosion is a couple of meters thick in places, at least on the walls. It’s very deep, it’s very old in my opinion, and it gives a rolling and undulating profile ...’5

4



‘An abstract of our team’s work was submitted to the Geological Society of America, and we were invited to present our findings at a poster session of at the GSA convention in San Diego—the geological Superbowl. Geologists from all over the world thronged to our booth, much intrigued. Dozens of experts in fields relevant to our research offered help and advice. Shown the evidence, some geologists just laughed, astounded [as Schoch had been initially] that in two centuries of research, no one, geologist or Egyptologist, had noticed that the Sphinx had been weathered by water.’ Serpent in the Sky, p. 229; Mystery of the Sphinx. NBC-TV, 1993. 275 geologists endorsed Schoch’s findings.

5 AAAS, Annual Meeting 1992, Debate: How Old is the Sphinx?


Such undulations are easily recognizable to stratigraphers and palaeontologists as having been caused by ‘precipitation-induced weathering’.



As Santha Faiia’s photographs of the Sphinx and the Sphinx enclosure indicate, this weathering takes the distinctive form of a combination of deep vertical fissures and undulating, horizontal coves— ‘a classic textbook example,’ in Schoch’s words,

‘of what happens to a limestone structure when you have rain beating down on it for thousands of years ... It’s clearly rain precipitation that produced these erosional features.’6

6 Mystery of the Sphinx.

Wind/sand erosion presents a very different profile of sharp-edged horizontal channels selectively scoured out from the softer layers of the affected rock. Under no circumstances can it cause the vertical fissures particularly visible in the wall of the Sphinx enclosure.



These could only have been ‘formed by water running down the wall’,7 the result of rain falling in enormous quantities, cascading over the slope of the Giza plateau and down into the Sphinx enclosure below.

‘It picked out the weak spots in the rock,’ Schoch elaborated, ‘and opened them up into these fissures—clear evidence to me as a geologist that this erosional feature was caused by rainfall.’8

Although in some places obscured by repair blocks put in place by numerous restorers over the passing millennia, the same observation holds true for the scooped-out, undulating, scalloped coves that run the entire length of the Sphinx’s body. Again, these are characteristic of precipitation-induced weathering because only long periods of heavy rainfall beating down on the upper parts of the immense structure (and cascading over its sides) could have produced such effects.



Confirmation of this comes from the fact that the limestone out of which the Sphinx was carved is not uniform in its composition, but consists of a series of hard and soft layers in which some of the more durable rocks recede farther than some of the less durable rocks.9



Such a profile simply could not have been produced by wind erosion (which would have selectively chiselled out the softer layers of rock) but,

‘is entirely consistent with precipitation-induced weathering where you have water, rain water beating down from above. The rocks higher up are the more durable ones but they recede back farther than some of the less durable rocks lower in the section which are more protected.’10

In his summing up at the AAAS meeting, Schoch concluded:

It’s well known that the Sphinx enclosure fills with sand very quickly, in just a matter of decades, under the desert conditions of the Sahara. And it has to be dug out periodically. And this has been the case since ancient times. Yet you still get this dramatic rolling, erosional profile in the Sphinx enclosure ...



Simply put, therefore, what I’m suggesting is that this rolling profile, these features seen on the body and in the Sphinx ditch, hark back to a much earlier period when there was more precipitation in the area, and more moisture, more rain on the Giza plateau.’11

7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 AAAS Annual Meeting 1992.

As Schoch admitted, he was not the first geologist to have noticed the ‘anomalous precipitation-induced weathering features on the core body of the Sphinx’.12 He was, however, the first to have become involved in public debates over the immense historical implications of this weathering. His attitude was that he preferred to stick to his geology:

I’ve been told over and over again that the peoples of Egypt, as far as we know, did not have either the technology or the social organization to cut out the core body of the Sphinx in pre-dynastic times ... However, I don’t see it as being my problem as a geologist. I’m not seeking to shift the burden, but its really up to the Egyptologists and archaeologists to figure out who carved it.



If my findings are in conflict with their theory about the rise of civilization then maybe its time for them to re-evaluate that theory. I’m not saying that the Sphinx was built by Atlanteans, or people from Mars, or extra-terrestrials. I’m just following the science where it leads me, and it leads me to conclude that the Sphinx was built much earlier than previously thought ...’13

12 Ibid. The relevant geologists include Farouk El Baz, and Roth and Raffai.

13 Extracts from Mystery of the Sphinx and AAAS meeting.




Legendary civilizations
How much earlier?

John West told us that he and Schoch had ‘a friendly debate going’ about the age of the Sphinx:

‘Schoch puts the date somewhere between 5000 BC and 7000 BC minimum [the epoch of the Neolithic Subpluvial] mainly by taking the most cautious view allowed by the data to hand. As a professor of Geology at a big university, he’s almost constrained to take a conservative view—and it’s true that there were rains between 7000 BC and 5000 BC.



However, for a variety of both intuitive and scholarly reasons, I think that the date is much, much older and that most of the weathering of the Sphinx took place in the earlier rainy period before 10,000 BC ... Frankly, if it was as relatively recent as 5000 to 7000 BC, I think we’d probably have found other evidence of the civilization that carved it. A lot of evidence from that period has been found in Egypt. There are some strange anomalies within it, I’ll admit,14 but most of it— the vast bulk—is really quite rudimentary.’

‘So who built the Sphinx if it wasn’t the pre-dynastic Egyptians?’



‘My conjecture is that the whole riddle is linked in some way to those legendary civilizations spoken of in all the mythologies of the world. You know—that there were great catastrophes, that a few people survived and went wandering around the earth and that a bit of knowledge was preserved here, a bit there ...



My hunch is that the Sphinx is linked to all that. If I were asked to place a bet I’d say that it predates the break-up of the last Ice Age and is probably older than 10000 BC, perhaps even older than 15,000 BC. My conviction—actually it’s more than a conviction—is that it’s vastly old?

14 Under the category of anomalies, West made specific reference to the bowls carved out of diorite and other hard stones described in Part VI.

This was a conviction I increasingly shared—and, I reminded myself, that most nineteenth-century Egyptologists had shared it too. Nevertheless the Sphinx’s appearance argued against such intuitions since there was no doubt that its head looked conventionally pharaonic.

‘If it’s as old as you think it is,’ I now asked John, ‘then how do you explain that the sculptors depicted it wearing the characteristic nemes head-dress and uraeus of dynastic times?’

‘I’m not bothered about that. In fact, as you know, Egyptologists contend that the face of the Sphinx resembles the face of Khafre—its one of the reasons why they claim it must have been built by him. Schoch and I have looked into this very carefully. We think, from the proportions of the head relative to the rest of the body, that it’s been recarved during dynastic times—and that’s why it looks very dynastic.



But we don’t think it was ever meant to represent Khafre. As part of our ongoing research into these issues we had Lieutenant Frank Domingo, a forensic artist with the New York Police Department, come over and do point by point comparisons between the face of the Sphinx and the face of Cephren’s statue in the Cairo Museum. His conclusion was that in no way was the Sphinx ever intended to represent Khafre.



It’s not just a matter of it being a different face—it’s probably a different race.15 So this is a very ancient monument that was recarved at a much later date. Originally it may not even have had a human face. Maybe it started out with a lion’s face as well as a lion’s body.’

15 'After reviewing my various drawings, schematics and measurements, my final conclusion concurs with my initial reaction: 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 Sphinx is not Khafre. If the ancient Egyptians were skilled technicians and capable of duplicating images, then these two works cannot represent the same individual.' Frank Domingo, cited in Serpent in the Sky, p. 232. See also AAAS 1992, for Schoch's views on the recarving of the Sphinx's head.


Magellan and the first dinosaur bone
After my own explorations at Giza I was interested to know whether West’s research had cast doubt on the orthodox dating of any of the other monuments on the plateau—particularly the so-called Valley Temple of Khafre.

‘We think there’s quite a lot of stuff that may be older,’ he told me. ‘Not just the Valley Temple but also the Mortuary Temple up the hill, probably something to do with the Menkaure complex, maybe even the Pyramid of Khafre ...’

‘What in the Menkaure complex?’

‘Well, the Mortuary Temple. And actually I’m only using the conventional attribution of the Pyramids for convenience here ...’

‘OK. So do you think it’s possible that the pyramids are as old as the Sphinx too?’

‘It’s hard to say. I think something was there where those pyramids now are—because of the geometry. The Sphinx was part of a master-plan. And the Khafre Pyramid is maybe the most interesting in that respect because it was definitely built in two stages. If you look at it—maybe you’ve noticed—you’ll see that its base consists of several courses of gigantic blocks similar in style to the blocks of the core masonry of the Valley Temple.



Superimposed above the base, the rest of the pyramid is composed of smaller, less precisely engineered stuff. But when you look at it, knowing what you’re looking for, you see instantly that it’s built in two separate bits. I mean I can’t help but feel that the vast blocks on the bottom date from the earlier period—from the time the Sphinx was built—and that the second part was added later—but even then not necessarily by Khafre. As you go into this you begin to realize that the more you learn the more complex everything becomes.



For example, there may even have been an intermediate civilization, which actually would correspond to the Egyptian texts. They talk themselves about two long prior periods. In the first of these Egypt was supposedly ruled by the gods—the Neteru—and in the second it was ruled by the Shemsu Hor, the “Companions of Horus”. So, as I say, the problems just get more and more complicated. Fortunately, however, the bottom line stays simple. The bottom line is the Sphinx wasn’t built by Khafre. The geology proves that it’s a hell of a lot older ...’

‘Nevertheless the Egyptologists won’t accept that it is. One of the arguments they’ve used against you—Mark Lehner did so—goes something like this:

“If the Sphinx was made before 10,000 BC then why can’t you show us the rest of the civilization that built it?”

In other words, why don’t you have any other evidence to put forward for the presence of your legendary lost civilization apart from a few structures on the Giza plateau? What do you say to that?’

‘First off, there are structures outside Giza—for example the Osireion in Abydos, where you’ve just come from. We think that amazing edifice may relate to our work on the Sphinx. Even if the Osireion didn’t exist, however, the absence of other evidence wouldn’t worry me.



I mean, to make a big deal out of the fact that further confirmatory evidence hasn’t been found yet and to use this to try to scuttle the arguments for an older Sphinx is completely illogical. Analogously it’s like saying to Magellan ...

“Where are the other guys who’ve sailed round the world? Of course it’s still flat.”

Or in 1838 when the first dinosaur bone was found they would have said,

“Of course there’s no such thing as a giant extinct animal. Where’s the rest of the skeletons? They’ve only found one bone.”

But once a few people began to realize that this bone could only be from an extinct animal, within twenty years the museums of the world were filled up with complete dinosaur skeletons. So it’s sort of like that. Nobody’s thought to look in the right places.



I’m absolutely certain that other evidence will be found once a few people start looking in the right places—along the banks of the ancient Nile, for example, which is miles from the present Nile, or even at the bottom of the Mediterranean, which was dry during the last Ice Age.’


The problem of transmission
I asked John West why he thought that Egyptologists and archaeologists were so unwilling to consider that the Sphinx might be a clue to the existence of a forgotten episode in human history.

‘The reason, I think, is that they’re quite fixed in their ideas about the linear evolution of civilization. They find it hard to come to terms with the notion that there might have been people, more than 12,000 years ago, who were more sophisticated than we are today ...



The Sphinx, and the geology which proves its antiquity, and the fact that the technology that was involved in making it is in many ways almost beyond our own capacities, contradicts the belief that civilization and technology have evolved in a straightforward, linear way ... Because even with the best modern technology we almost couldn’t carry out the various tasks that were involved in the project.



The Sphinx itself, that’s not such a staggering feat. I mean if you get enough sculptors to cut the stone away they could carve a statue a mile long. The technology was involved in taking the stones, quarrying the stones, to free the Sphinx from its bedrock and then in moving those stones and using them to build the Valley Temple a couple of hundred feet away ...’

This was news to me:

‘You mean that the 200-ton blocks in the Valley Temple walls were quarried right out of the Sphinx enclosure?’

‘Yes, no doubt about it. Geologically they’re from the identical member of rock. They were quarried out, moved over to the site of the Temple— God knows how—and erected into forty-foot-high walls—again God knows how. I’m talking about the huge limestone core blocks, not the granite facing. I think that the granite was added much later, quite possibly by Khafre.



But if you look at the limestone core blocks you’ll see that they bear the marks of exactly the same kind of precipitation-induced weathering that are found on the Sphinx. So the Sphinx and the core structure of the Valley Temple were made at the same time by the same people—whoever they may have been.’

‘And do you think that those people and the later dynastic Egyptians were connected to each other in some way? In Serpent in the Sky you suggested that a legacy must have been passed on.’

‘It’s still just a suggestion. All that I know for sure on the basis of our work on the Sphinx is that a very, very high, sophisticated civilization capable of undertaking construction projects on a grand scale was present in Egypt in the very distant past. Then there was a lot of rain.

Then, thousands of years later, in the same place, pharaonic civilization popped up already fully formed, apparently out of nowhere, with all its knowledge complete. That much we can be certain of. But whether or not the knowledge that Ancient Egypt possessed was the same as the knowledge that produced the Sphinx I really can’t say.’

‘How about this,’ I speculated: ‘The civilization that produced the Sphinx wasn’t based here, at least not originally ... It wasn’t in Egypt. It put the Sphinx here as some sort of a marker or outpost ...’

‘Perfectly possible. Could be that the Sphinx for that civilization was like, let’s say, what Abu Simbel [in Nubia] was for dynastic Egypt.’

‘Then that civilization came to an end, was extinguished by some sort of massive catastrophe, and that’s when the legacy of high knowledge was handed on ... Because they had the Sphinx here they knew about Egypt, they knew this place, they knew this country, they had a connection here. Maybe people survived the ending of that civilization. Maybe they came here. ... Does that work for you?’

‘Well, it’s a possibility. Again, going back into the mythologies and legends of the world, many of them tell of such a catastrophe and of the few people—the Noah story that’s prevalent through endless civilizations—who somehow or other retained and passed on knowledge.



The big problem with all this, from my point of view, is the transmission process: how exactly the knowledge does get handed on during the thousands and thousands of years between the construction of the Sphinx and the flowering of dynastic Egypt. Theoretically you’re sort of stuck—aren’t you?—with this vast period in which the knowledge has to be transmitted. This is not easy to slough off. On the other hand we do know that those legends we’re referring to were passed on word for word over countless generations.



And in fact oral transmission is a much surer means of transmission than written transmission, because the language may change but as long as whoever’s telling the story tells it true in whatever the language of the time is ... it surfaces some 5000 years later in its original form. So maybe there are ways—in secret societies and religious cults, or through mythology, for example—that the knowledge could have been preserved and passed on before flowering again.



The point, I think, with problems as complex and important as these, is simply not to dismiss any possibilities, no matter how outrageous they may at first seem, without investigating them very, very thoroughly ...’


Second opinion
John West was in Luxor, leading a study group on Egypt’s sacred sites. Early the next day he and his students went south to Aswan and Abu Simbel. Santha and I journeyed north again, back towards Giza and the mysteries of the Sphinx and the pyramids. We were to meet there with the archaeo-astronomer Robert Bauval.


As we shall see, his stellar correlations provided startling independent corroboration for the geological evidence of Giza’s vast antiquity

SEE BLOG : PIRI REIS MAP "PYRAMID MEASUREMENTS"

IT'S UNDER THE BLOG TITLE : 9/11 SUN WORSHIPPERS PROOF