From Atlantis to the Sphinx Read online

  Sitchin points out that no marks of any kind were found in Davison’s Chamber, discovered in 1765—only in those discovered by Howard-Vyse. And, noting that Howard-Vyse dismissed Caviglia the day after his secret visit to Davison’s Chamber, and his foreman on the day the workmen broke through into Wellington’s Chamber, he concludes reasonably that Howard-Vyse preferred not to be observed by anyone who had his wits about him. He notes that Hill was allowed to wander in and out of the newly discovered chambers freely, and that it was he who first copied the quarry marks and other inscriptions.

  The atmosphere that surrounded Vyse’s operations in those hectic days is well described by the Colonel himself. Major discoveries were being made all around the pyramids, but not within them. Campbell’s Tomb, discovered by the detested Caviglia, was yielding not only artefacts but also masons’ markings and hieroglyphics in red paint. Vyse was becoming desperate to achieve his own discovery. Finally he broke through to hitherto unknown chambers; but they only duplicated one after the other a previously discovered chamber (Davison’s) and were bare and empty. What could he show for all the effort and expenditure? For what would he be honoured, by what would he be remembered?

  We know from Vyse’s chronicles that, by day, he had sent in Mr Hill to inscribe the chambers with the names of the Duke of Wellington and Admiral Nelson, heroes of the victories over Napoleon. By night, we suspect, Mr Hill also entered the chambers, to ‘christen’ the pyramid with the cartouches of its presumed ancient builder.2

  The problem was that in the 1830s, knowledge of hieroglyphics was still minimal (the Rosetta Stone, with its parallel inscriptions in Greek and ancient Egyptian, had only been discovered in 1799). One of the few books that Hill might have consulted would be Sir John Wilkinson’s Materia Hieroglyphica, and even Wilkinson was uncertain about the reading of royal names.

  Sitchin suggests that what happened is that Hill inscribed the name that Wilkinson thought was Khufu, and then Howard-Vyse heard that a new work by Wilkinson, the three-volume Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, published earlier that year, had just reached Cairo. Howard-Vyse and Hill did some frantic—and unexplained—commuting between Giza and Cairo soon after the discovery of the chamber named after Lady Arbuthnot. They must have been dismayed to find that Wilkinson had changed his mind about how Khufu was spelt, and that Hill had inscribed the wrong name in the lower chambers. They hastened to put right this appalling blunder in the newly discovered Campbell’s Chamber, and at last the correct spelling of Khufu appeared.

  But what they did not know was that Wilkinson was still incorrect. The ‘Kh’ of Khufu should be rendered by a symbol like a small circle with lines hatched across it—a sieve. Wilkinson, and a Frenchman named Laborde (who had also written about hieroglyphs in a travel book) made the mistake of rendering this as a sun-disc—a circle with a dot in the middle. In fact, this was the name for the sun god Ra. So instead of writing ‘Khufu’, the forger wrote ‘Raufu’. No ancient Egyptian would have made such an appalling and blasphemous error.

  But what about the red paint? Would it not be obvious that the inscriptions were modern, and not more than four thousand years old? No. The same red ochre paint was still used by the Arabs, and Perring noted that it was hard to distinguish ancient quarry marks from new ones. (In the same way, many Cro-Magnon cave paintings look as fresh as if they were made yesterday.)

  Sitchin notes that Mr Hill, who had been a mere copper mill employee when Howard-Vyse met him, became the owner of the Cairo Hotel when Howard-Vyse left Egypt, and that Howard-Vyse thanks him effusively in his book. Howard-Vyse himself had spent ten thousand pounds—an incredible sum—on his excavations. But the black sheep was able to return to his family as a famous scholar and discoverer.

  It is Sitchin’s intention to try to prove that the Great Pyramid was built in some remote age, at the time of the Sphinx. This would seem to be a reasonable assumption—except that carbon-dating tests on organic material found in the mortar of the Great Pyramid seem to indicate that its date was—give or take a century or so—the middle of the third millennium BC. (We shall see later that there is another reason—the astronomical alignment of the ‘air vents’ in the King’s Chamber—for accepting the conventional dating.) It is nevertheless worth bearing in mind the curious tale of how Egyptologists came to accept that the Great Pyramid was built by Khufu, and to draw from it the moral that, where ancient civilisations are concerned, nothing should be taken for granted unless it is based on hard scientific evidence.

  Mr Hill, at least, had one genuine discovery to his credit. John Greaves had noted two nine-inch openings in the walls of the King’s Chamber, and speculated that they were air vents. It was Hill who, two centuries later, clambered up the outside of the Pyramid and found the outlets that proved that they were air vents. When they were cleared of debris, a cool breeze rushed down them, keeping the King’s Chamber at a constant 68 degrees Fahrenheit, no matter what the temperature outside. Again, this only seemed to increase the mystery. Why should the ancient Egyptians want a chamber kept at exactly 68 degrees? One of the scholars Napoleon had taken with him to Egypt in 1798, Edmé-François Jomard, speculated that the Chamber might be a storage place for measuring instruments, which would need to be kept at a constant temperature. But this theory failed to explain why, in that case, the King’s Chamber had to be virtually inaccessible. Or why it had to be approached by a long, slippery gallery of smooth limestone rather than a sensible staircase.

  It is difficult for a reader, who has to rely on facts and figures printed in a book, to realise how much more baffling the Great Pyramid is when confronted in its overwhelming reality. In Fingerprints of the Gods, Graham Hancock conveys something of his own bewilderment as he repeats: ‘All was confusion. All was paradox. All was mystery.’ For the inner architecture of the Pyramid simply fails to make sense. Everything has an air of precision, of some exact purpose; yet it is impossible to begin to guess the nature of this purpose. For example, the ‘walls’ or ramps on either side of the ‘slot’ at the centre of the Grand Gallery have a series of slots cut into them. These could be to help the climber. But why are the holes of two different lengths, alternately long and short, and why do the short ones slope, while the long ones are horizontal? And why does the sloping length of the short holes equal the horizontal length of the long holes? It is as if the place had been designed by an insane mathematician.

  To see these vast blocks—some weighing as much as 70 tons—all laid in place as neatly as if they were ordinary-sized builder’s bricks, brings an overwhelming sense of the incredible skill involved. Medieval cathedrals were built by masons who devoted their lives to the study of their craft, and who apparently incorporated as many mysterious measurements as the Great Pyramid. But cathedral building lasted for centuries, and there were so many that the masons had plenty of time to practise their craft. The pyramids of Giza were preceded—according to the history books—by a few cruder examples like the Step Pyramid at Saqqara and the Bent Pyramid at Dahshur. Where did the Great Pyramid’s craftsmen learn their skill?

  Again, why was the Great Pyramid so bleak and bare, like a geometrical demonstration? Why were there none of the wall decorations that we associate with Egyptian temples? As we saw in the last chapter, even an object as simple as the sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber presented impossible technical problems, so that Flinders Petrie speculated that it had been cut out of the granite by bronze saws studded with diamonds, and hollowed out by some totally unknown ‘drill’ made of a tube with a saw edge tipped with diamonds. Moreover (as we saw in the last chapter), swan-necked vases, cut out of basalt, quartz and diorite with some unknown tool, seem to prove conclusively that there was a highly sophisticated civilisation in Egypt long before the First Dynasty. This is not some Daniken-like crankery, but hard evidence that Egyptologists refuse to face squarely.

  The first scientific theory of the purpose of the Great Pyramid was put forward by a London publisher named John Tay
lor in 1864. He wondered why the builders of the Pyramid had chosen to make it slope at an angle of almost 52°—51° 51'. When he compared the height of the Pyramid with the length of its base he saw the only possible answer: it had to slope at that exact angle if the relation of its height to the length of its base should be exactly the relation of the radius of a circle to its circumference. In other words, the builders were revealing a knowledge of what the Greeks would later call π (pi). Why should they want to encode π in the Pyramid? Could it possibly be that they were really speaking about the earth itself, so the Pyramid was supposed to represent the hemisphere from the North Pole to the equator? In fact, towards the end of the second century BC, the Greek grammarian Agatharchides of Cnidus, the tutor of the pharaoh’s children, was told that the base of the Great Pyramid was precisely one eighth of a minute of a degree in length—that is, it was an eighth of a minute of a degree of the earth’s circumference. (A minute is a sixtieth of a degree.) In fact, if the length of the Pyramid’s base is multiplied by eight, then sixty, then 360, the result is just under 25,000 miles, a remarkable approximation of the circumference of the earth.

  Taylor concluded that, being unable to build a huge dome, the Egyptians had done the next best thing and incorporated the earth’s measurements into a pyramid.

  So it was possible—indeed, highly likely—that the ancient Egyptians possessed knowledge that was thousands of years ahead of their time.

  Unfortunately, this was Taylor’s sticking point. Rather than give the ancient Egyptians credit for knowing far more than anyone thought, he concluded that the only way these ignoramuses could have known such things was from Divine Revelation—God had directly inspired them. That was too much even for the Victorians, and his work was received with derision.

  When the Scottish Astronomer Royal, Charles Piazzi Smyth—who was also a friend of Taylor’s—visited the Pyramid in 1865 and made his own measurements, he concluded that Taylor was fundamentally correct about π. But being, like Taylor, a Christian zealot, he was also unable to resist the temptation to drag in Jehovah and the Bible. Not long before, a religious crank named Robert Menzies had advanced the theory that the Great Pyramid contained detailed prophecies of world history in its measurements. Piazzi Smyth swallowed this whole, and concluded that the Pyramid revealed that the earth was created in 4004 BC, and that it contains all the major dates in earth history, such as the Flood in 2400 BC. He also came up with a staggeringly simple explanation of why the Grand Gallery is so different from the narrow ascending passage that leads to it: its beginning symbolises the birth of Christ. The Second Coming, he concluded, will happen in 1911. All this was again received by his scientific contemporaries with scepticism, although his book had considerable popular success.

  Later, the founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Charles Taze Russell, would embrace the prophecy theory of the Great Pyramid, and a group called the British Israelites, who believed that the British are the ten lost tribes of Israel, elaborated it even further.3

  More sober theories of the Pyramid’s purpose included the suggestion that it was intended as a landmark for Egyptian land surveyors, and that it was a giant sundial. This latter led to the most interesting and plausible theory so far: that it was intended as an astronomical observatory. This had been stated as fact by the fifth-century Byzantine philosopher Proclus, who mentioned that the Pyramid was used as an observatory while it was under construction. In 1883 it was again advanced by an astronomer, Richard Anthony Proctor.

  Proctor realised that one of the prime necessities for an agricultural civilisation is an accurate calendar, which involves precise observation of the moon and stars. What they would need, to begin with, is a long narrow slot pointing due north (or south), through which the passage of stars and planets could be observed and noted down in star tables.

  The first necessity, said Proctor, was to determine true north, then align a tube on it. Nowadays we point a telescope at the Pole star; but in ancient Egypt, this was not in the same place, due to a phenomenon called ‘procession of the equinoxes’ (a term to note, since it will play a major part in later arguments). Imagine a pencil stuck through the earth from the North to the South Pole; this is its axis. But due to the gravity of the sun and moon, this axis has a slight wobble, and its ends describe small circles in the heavens, causing the north end of the pencil to point at different stars. In ancient Egypt, the Pole star was Alpha Draconis.

  Now the stars appear to describe a semicircle above our heads, from horizon to horizon. Those directly overhead (at the meridian) describe the longest circle, those nearest the Pole the smallest. If the ancient Egyptians had wanted to point a telescope at Alpha Draconis, they would have had to point it at an angle of 26° 17'—which, Proctor noted, happens to be precisely the angle of the descending passage.

  He also noted that if the ‘vermin-infested pit’ underneath the Pyramid had been filled with water, the light of the then Pole star, Alpha Draconis, would shine down it on to the ‘pool’, as into the mirror of a modern astronomer’s telescope. The flat top of the Great Pyramid was, according to Proctor, an observatory platform.

  Proctor’s theory had the advantage of suggesting the purpose of the Grand Gallery, and the peculiar oblong holes in its ‘ramp’. If, said Proctor, an ancient astronomer wanted an ideal ‘telescope’ to study the heavens, he would probably ask an architect to devise a building with an enormous slot in one of its walls, through which he could study the transit of the stars. Proctor thought that the top end of the Grand Gallery was originally such a slot. Astronomers stationed on scaffolding above the Grand Gallery—with the scaffolding based in the oblong holes—would be able to observe the transits of stars with great accuracy. The bricks in the apex of the Grand Gallery are removable, and this would also enable them to study the stars overhead.

  The obvious objection is that the Grand Gallery at present ends halfway across the Pyramid, and that the King’s Chamber with its ‘secret chambers’ lies beyond it. The present King’s Chamber would have completely blocked the ‘slot’. But is it not conceivable, said Proctor, that the Pyramid remained in its half-finished state for a long time before it was finished? In fact, once the heavens had been minutely mapped, the unfinished pyramid would have served its purpose, and could be completed. Proctor envisaged that it would take about ten years before the builders were ready to move beyond the Grand Gallery, and by that time the priests would have completed their work of making star maps and calendars.

  In retrospect, it seems clear that Proctor had come the closest so far to suggesting a reasonable theory of the Great Pyramid. Since The Great Pyramid, Observatory, Tomb and Temple, we have become increasingly aware of the astronomical alignments of great monuments like the Egyptian temples and Stonehenge. In fact, it was only ten years after Proctor's book, in 1893, that the British astronomer Norman Lockyer (later Sir Norman), who identified helium in the sun, went on to demonstrate precisely how Egyptian temples could have been used. On holiday in Greece, the young Lockyer found himself wondering if the Parthenon was aligned astronomically—recalling, as he said later, that the east windows of many English churches face the sunrise on the day of their patron saint. Since Egyptian temples had been measured and documented so carefully, he turned to them to seek evidence for his thesis. He was able to show that temples were astronomically aligned, so that the light of a star or other heavenly body would penetrate their depths as it might have penetrated a telescope. He noted, for example, how the light of the sun at the summer solstice entered the temple of Amen-Ra at Karnak and penetrated along its axis to the sanctuary. Lockyer was also the first to suggest that Stonehenge had been constructed as a sort of observatory—a view now generally accepted.

  The significance of Lockyer’s method was that it enabled him to date Stonehenge to 1680 BC, and the Karnak temple—or at least its original plan—to about 3700 BC. He noted that sun temples were designed to catch the sun at the solstice (when the sun is furthest from the equator
) or the equinox (when the sun is above it), and star temples to catch the star’s heliacal rising (just before dawn), again at a solstice. But he also noted that a sun temple could serve as a ‘calendar’ for much longer than a star temple. This is because a star temple is subject to the precession of the equinoxes already mentioned. Although it amounts to a tiny fraction—1/72 of a degree per annum (causing the stars to rise twenty minutes later each year) it obviously adds up over the centuries, coming a full circle every 25,920 years. The result was that star temples had to be realigned every century or so—Lockyer pointed out evidence that the Luxor temple had been realigned four times, explaining its curious and irregular shape, to which Schwaller de Lubicz was to devote so many years of study.

  According to Lockyer, the earliest Egyptian temples, at Heliopolis and Annu, were oriented to northern stars at the summer solstice, while the Giza pyramids were built by ‘a new invading race’ who were far more astronomically sophisticated, and used both northern and eastern stars.

  But why should the Egyptians take such a deep interest in the heavens? One reason, as we have already observed, is that farmers need a calendar—in 3200 BC, the ‘dog star’ Sirius became the most important star in the heavens because it rose at dawn at the beginning of the Egyptian New Year, when the Nile began to rise. But for the Egyptians, the stars were not merely seasonal indicators. They were also the home of the gods who presided over life and death.

  And it was this recognition that would form the basis of one of the most interesting insights into the Great Pyramid since the days of Proctor.

  In 1979, a Belgian construction engineer named Robert Bauval was on his way to Egypt, and bought at London’s Heathrow Airport a book called The Sirius Mystery by Robert Temple.

  The book had caused some sceptical reviewers to classify Temple with Erich von Daniken; but this is hardly fair. Temple’s starting point was a genuine scientific mystery: that an African tribe called the Dogon (in Mali) have known for a long time that the dog star Sirius is actually a double star, with an ‘invisible’ companion. Astronomers had suspected this companion, Sirius B, since the 1830s, when Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel noted the perturbations in the orbit of Sirius, and reasoned that there must be an incredibly dense but invisible star—what we now call a white dwarf, in which atoms have collapsed in on themselves, so that a piece the size of a pinhead weighs many tons. According to the Dogon, their knowledge of Sirius B—which they called the Digitaria star—was brought to them by fishlike creatures called the Nommo, who came from Sirius thousands of years ago. It was not until 1928, when Sir Arthur Addington postulated the existence of ‘white dwarfs’, that knowledge of Sirius B ceased to be the province of a few astronomers. It seems inconceivable that some European traveller could have brought such knowledge to the Dogon long before that. In any case, the Dogon possessed cult masks relating to Sirius, stored in caves, some of them centuries old.