From Atlantis to the Sphinx Read online

  Some of Cayce’s more alarming prophecies were that the earth would be subject to a period of cataclysm between 1958 and the end of the century, that Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York would all be destroyed, while Japan would vanish beneath the Pacific; in fact, although there is still time (writing in 1995) for Cayce to prove correct, there have so far been no more cataclysms than in any other similar period of history.

  Anyone who is familiar with the history of the paranormal will recognise Edgar Cayce as a typical example of a highly gifted psychic—with all the disadvantages that seems to entail. Psychical research seems to be subject to a curious limitation which might be labelled ‘James’s Law’, after the philosopher William James, who declared that there always seems to be just enough evidence to convince the believers, and never quite enough to convince the sceptics. All the great psychics and clairvoyants have had enough successes to prove their genuineness, and enough failures to prove that they are highly fallible. Cayce is clearly no exception.

  It must be admitted that, at this point in this book, Cayce is something of a digression—Bauval makes only a brief and passing reference to him—and to ‘The Atlantis events’—in The Orion Mystery. Yet the curious coincidence of the date—10,400 BC—raises an important question: why should the pyramid builders arrange the Giza pyramids to reflect the position of Orion’s Belt in 10,450 BC? It is hard to disagree with Bauval that they wished to indicate this date as an important time in their history—probably as the beginning of their epoch, their ‘Genesis’.

  The Giza pyramids took at least three generations to build: Cheops, Chefren and Menkaura, extending over about a century. It seems, then, that Chefren and Menkaura were building according to a plan. It is possible that this plan was drawn up by Cheops and his priests. But, as Bauval has shown, it is arguable that the plan was there from the beginning—10,450 BC. There is evidence that the great Gothic cathedrals were planned centuries before they were built; Bauval is suggesting that this is also true of the pyramids of Giza.

  And if we accept the arguments of West and Schoch about the water-weathering of the Sphinx, then it seems likely that West is correct in assigning the Sphinx to 10,450 BC.

  Let us, then, merely for the sake of argument, assume that both West and Bauval are correct. Let us suppose that the survivors of some catastrophe came to Egypt in the middle of the 11th millennium BC, and began trying to reconstruct a fragment of their lost culture in exile. They begin by carving the front part of the Sphinx from an outcrop of hard limestone on the banks of the Nile. It faced sunrise on the spring (vernal) equinox. At some subsequent period they go on to excavate the limestone below it, and carve the lion’s body.

  Why a lion? Because, suggests Graham Hancock, the age in which the Sphinx was built was the Age of Leo. We have seen that the wobble of the earth’s axis—which causes the precession of the equinoxes—means that it moves like the hour hand of a clock, pointing to a different constellation every 2,160 years. The Age of Leo lasted from 10,970 to 8810 BC. Hancock clinches his argument by asking if it is coincidence that in the Age of Pisces (our present age) the symbol of Christianity is the fish, that in the preceding Age of Aries, we find rams sacrificed in the Old Testament, and an upsurge of the ram god Amon in Egypt, while in the previous Age of Taurus the Egyptians worshipped Apis, the bull, and the bull-cult flourished in Minoan Crete.

  So these proto-Egyptians began to plan their great sky temple in the 11th millennium BC, and continued for the next thousand years or so, probably building the Sphinx Temple and the Valley Temple with the giant blocks removed from around the Sphinx. They may also have built the Oseirion near Abydos, and many other monuments that have now vanished beneath the sand.

  In that case, it seems incredible that they failed to make a start on the pyramid complex. Hancock points out that the lower half of the Chefren pyramid is built of ‘Cyclopean blocks’, while halfway up it changes to smaller blocks, which may suggest that it was started at a much earlier stage. West also remarks: ‘On the eastern side of Chefren’s pyramid the blocks are particularly huge, as much as 20 feet (6.4 m) long and one foot (.3 m) thick...’

  But if part of Chefren’s pyramid was built, it seems unlikely that the Great Pyramid remained in blueprint. The heart of the Great Pyramid, according to Iodden Edwards in The Pyramids of Egypt, consists of ‘a nucleus of rock, the size of which cannot be precisely determined’. This could have been a mound of considerable size, possibly a ‘sacred mound’. Possibly the lower chamber was also cut out of the rock at this time, forming a kind of crypt. And if the pyramids were intended to mirror the stars in Orion’s Belt, then it seems more likely that a start was also made on the third pyramid, of Menkaura. It is even possible that was another sacred mound on this site.

  Why should these proto-Egyptians not have gone on to complete all three pyramids?

  The obvious suggestion is that if only a small group of them arrived in Egypt—perhaps a hundred or so—then they simply lacked the manpower. What they needed, to begin with, was simply a religious centre—the equivalent of St Peter’s in Rome or St Paul’s in London. The Sphinx and the sacred mound—or mounds—would have provided this.

  But, as we shall see in a later chapter, Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock have produced a far more interesting and plausible suggestion—a suggestion based on computer-created simulations of the skies over Egypt between 10,500 and 2500 BC.

  We have no way of guessing what might have happened between these two dates. Few civilisations flourish for more than a few thousand years, and so it seems unlikely that this proto-Egyptian civilisation lasted until pharaonic times. As a civilisation, it may not even have lasted until the sixth or fifth millennium BC, when (according to Encyclopaedia Britannica) Stone Age people began to migrate into the Nile valley and grow crops. The notion that Stone Age cultures (the Tasian, Badarian and Naqadan) could exist side by side with the remains of proto-Egyptian culture suggests that the proto-Egyptians were nothing more than a priestly remnant—perhaps living, like the Essenes of a later age, in some equivalent of the Dead Sea caves, and preserving their knowledge as the monasteries of the Dark Ages preserved European learning.

  As we shall see later, there is a certain amount of evidence for the existence of this priestly cast—sometimes referred to as ‘the Companions of Osiris’—in the millennia between 10,500 and 2500 BC.

  What we do know is that—perhaps as early as 4000 BC—Egypt began to unite into a nation. A work called the Turin Papyrus—unfortunately badly damaged when it was sent to the Turin Museum without proper packing—mentions nine dynasties of kings of Egypt before Menes. Before that, it says, Egypt was ruled by gods and demigods—the latter may mean some priestly caste. The Palermo Stone mentions 120 kings before Menes. The third-century BC Egyptian priest Manetho also produced a list which reaches back to a distant age of gods, and covers nearly 25,000 years.

  What seems clear, if Schwaller de Lubicz is correct, is that there came a point when the 'demigods’ or priests became the mentors of early pharaonic civilisation, and taught them geometry, science and medicine.

  But were they mentors in any practical sense? If they were, then we have to answer some difficult historical puzzles.

  About a century before Cheops, the pharaoh Zoser built an impressive funeral complex at Saqqara, including the famous Step Pyramid. This was supervised by the legendary architect Imhotep, who was also Zoser’s Grand Vizier, and probably High Priest. The Greeks called him Aesclepius, and made him the god of medicine. He sounds as if he might well be a descendant of the ‘New Race’. The Step Pyramid was started as a mastaba—a mud-brick tomb covered with stucco—and then enlarged literally step by step, until it was six ‘storeys’ high. It seems to have provided the Old Kingdom Egyptians with the idea of creating pyramids.

  Two generations after Zoser came the Pharaoh Snofru (or Snefru), the father of Cheops, whom the ancient Egyptians believed ordered the construction of a pyramid at Meidum (in fact, it is now
believed to have been built by Huni, the last of the 3rd Dynasty pharaohs), which looks unfinished. All that stands now is a huge square tower (in two stages) on the top of what looks like a hill. It was not until 1974 that a German physicist named Kurt Mendelssohn pointed out why the pyramid is unfinished: it collapsed before it was completed—probably with immense loss of life. The ‘hill’ on which it appears to be standing is a pile of rubble. The pharaoh started by building a seven-storey pyramid, then added an eighth. At this point, it was decided to convert it into what is almost certainly the first smooth pyramid by adding packing blocks, and a layer of heavy casing stone. Bad workmanship was probably responsible for one of the casing stones being squeezed out of place by the accumulated sideways thrust of the pyramid, and the remainder must have collapsed like an avalanche within seconds.

  This, Mendelssohn argues,4 is why another pyramid, the so-called Bent Pyramid at Dahshur, changes to a less steep angle halfway up. In all probability, it too was built by Snofru, and the fact that its angle becomes less steep suggests that its architect had profited from the earlier disaster.

  Mendelssohn’s central argument is that the pyramids were not built as tombs, but in order to unite many tribes into a nation-state by giving them a common task. It is an interesting argument, but it sounds like the theory of a modern liberal who was a pupil of Einstein (as Mendelssohn was), rather than that of an Egyptologist. Why did Snofru not get them to do something more practical, like construct a Nile dam, or vast granaries? We feel intuitively that, whatever the purpose of the pyramids, it had something to do with Egyptian religion.

  The fiasco at Meidum seems to contradict Schwaller’s theory that the swift emergence of pharaonic civilisation was due to its Atlantean legacy. Admitting that the skill shown in the building of the Great Pyramid suggests an ancient and highly sophisticated civilisation, we are still entitled to ask: where were the Atlanteans when Snofru’s architect was revealing his incompetence?

  The answer could nevertheless be simple. If the Sphinx-builders had lived for thousands of years in the same isolation as monks in the Dark Ages, nothing is more likely than that they had lost their constructive skills, and had to learn them all over again.

  Then why assume they played any part in pharaonic Egypt? Is it not conceivable that they had vanished from the face of the earth, leaving behind only a library of mouldering papyri that few people could decipher? Why should we assume that they emerged from their isolation and began to play a practical part in the religion of the pharaohs?

  Well, there is, to begin with, one intriguing piece of evidence. Boats.

  In May 1954, an archaeologist named Kamal el-Mallakh discovered a rectangular pit on the south side of the Great Pyramid—103 feet long and 17½ feet deep. Six feet down there was a ceiling of huge limestone roofing blocks, some weighing 15 tons. Under this roof lay a dismantled boat made of cedar wood. When reconstructed—it took fourteen years—the result was a ship 143 feet long, as large as those that carried the Vikings across the Atlantic. John West describes it as ‘a far more seaworthy craft than anything available to Columbus’. Thor Heyerdahl disagrees; speaking of this same craft in The Ra Expeditions, he says that ‘the streamlined hull would have collapsed on its first encounter with ocean waves’. It was built, he says, for ‘pomp and ceremony’, and was intended for use of the pharaoh in the afterlife. Yet he also acknowledges that ‘he had built it on architectonic lines which the world’s leading seafaring nations never surpassed. He had built his frail river boat to a pattern created by shipbuilders from a people with a long, solid tradition of sailing on the open sea.’ (My italics.)

  Now Heyerdahl, if anyone, should recognise the design of a seagoing craft when he sees it. In fact, it is his contention that these early Egyptians could have sailed across the Atlantic on a ship made of papyrus reeds. But he can scarcely be said to have proved it, for his papyrus ship was virtually under water by the time it reached Barbados.

  Obviously, this raises a central question. If Khufu’s ship was designed ‘to a pattern created by shipbuilders from a people with a long, solid tradition of sailing on the open sea’, who were these shipbuilders? There was very little timber in Egypt, until large quantities began to be imported towards the end of the 3rd Dynasty—Khufu’s father Snofru built a fleet of 60 ships.5 But during the early dynasties, they could hardly be described as a people with a long tradition of sailing the open sea; after all, they had been—according to orthodox history—wandering nomads only a few centuries earlier.

  When Graham Hancock was at Abydos, he was reminded of another facet of this mystery when he went to see a whole graveyard of boats buried in the desert eight miles from the Nile—no less than a dozen ships, some of them 72 feet long. This is only about half the length of the Khufu ship—but then, they date from five centuries earlier—Hancock quotes a Guardian report (21 December 1991) which states that they are 5000 years old. Again, the design was of seagoing ships, not Nile boats.

  Agreeing that these ships—and another found in a second pit near the Great Pyramid—were purely ritual objects, intended for the use of the dead pharaoh, where did the ancient Egyptians get the design from?

  According to Schwaller de Lubicz—and West—the answer is: from survivors from Atlantis, who arrived in ships. But is there any evidence of the use of seagoing ships before the age of the pharaohs?

  As it happens, there is.

  4 The Forbidden Word

  In 1966, an American professor of the history of science named Charles H. Hapgood caused widespread controversy with a book called Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings. The reason becomes clear from the title of his final chapter: ‘A Civilisation that Vanished’, which begins:

  The evidence presented by the ancient maps appears to suggest the existence in remote times, before the rise of any known cultures, of a true civilisation, of an advanced kind, which either was localised in one area but had worldwide commerce, or was, in a real sense, a worldwide culture. This culture, at least in some respects, was more advanced than the civilisations of Greece and Rome. In geodesy, nautical science, and mapmaking it was more advanced than any known culture before the 18th century of the Christian Era. It was only in the 18th century that we developed a practical means of finding longitude. It was in the 18th century that we first accurately measured the circumference of the earth. Not until the 19th century did we begin to send out ships for exploration into the Arctic or Antarctic Seas and only then did we begin the exploration of the bottom of the Atlantic. The maps indicate that some ancient people did all these things.

  It was unfortunate for Hapgood that in the following year, 1967, these same ancient maps figured prominently in a book called Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Daniken, whose purpose was to demonstrate that they proved the earth had been visited in remote ages by visitors from outer space. How otherwise, Daniken asked, could ancient man have accurately plotted the coast of South America, and the North and South Poles, unless they had seen them from the air? Von Daniken’s many inaccuracies, and the sensational nature of his theories, caused a violent reaction among serious scholars, who decided that the whole thing was a bubble of absurdity. And as Daniken’s inaccuracies were exposed (for example, multiplying the weight of the Great Pyramid by five), the idea gradually got around that the whole question of the ‘maps of the ancient sea kings’ was an exploded myth.

  This was totally untrue. More than a quarter of a century after its publication, the evidence of Hapgood’s book remains as solid and as unshaken as ever.

  In September 1956, Hapgood had been deeply involved in the study of another mystery, that of the great Ice Ages, when he heard of an intriguing puzzle that sounded as if it might have some bearing on his enquiries. On 26 August 1956, there had been a radio discussion of an ancient map known as the Piri Re’is map, which had been the property of a Turkish pirate who had been beheaded in 1554. A panel of respectable academics and scientists had supported the view that this map appeared to show the South Pol
e as it had been before it was covered with ice.

  The controversy had arisen because earlier that year, a Turkish naval officer had presented the US Navy Hydrographic Office with a copy of the Piri Re’is map, whose original had been found in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul in 1929. It was painted on parchment and dated 1513, and showed the Atlantic Ocean, with a small part of the coast of Africa on the right, and the whole coast of South America on the left. And, at the bottom of the map, what looked like Antarctica.

  The map was passed on to the Hydrographic Office’s cartographic expert, W. I. Walters, who in turn had shown it to a friend named Captain Arlington H. Mallery, who studied old Viking maps. It was after he had studied the map at home that Mallery made the astonishing statement that he believed it showed the coast of Antarctica as it had been before it was covered by thick ice. It appeared to show certain bays in Queen Maud Land as they had been before they were frozen over. In 1949 an expedition mounted by Norway, Sweden and Britain had taken sonar soundings through the ice—which in places was a mile thick—and discovered these long-vanished bays.