Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology's Greatest Mystery

by Christopher Knight

  We arrived at Robert’s home early the next day. It was a delightful apartment in a high building that gave him a fantastic panoramic view of the Mediterranean. In the first few hours we talked about many things and Chris was surprised to hear that a friend of his had visited Robert and his wife the previous evening. This was the American novelist, Katherine Neville. A few years earlier Chris had enjoyed a memorable dinner with Katherine and her husband, Professor Karl Pribram, the award-winning medical academic and neurosurgeon. The conversation had been delightfully varied, extending from the motive behind the fall of the Knights Templar to Karl’s latest researches into the quantum state of the Bose-Einstein condensate elements within the human brain.

  We could only hope that today’s discussion was going to be as much fun – but hopefully less complicated!

  Robert had invited his elder brother, John Paul, to join us. John Paul is an architect and has lived in this part of Spain for 45 years. He has been a major force in its development as a tourist location. But he is also a talented amateur mathematician, who was keen to hear more of the metrological properties underlying our findings.

  Our meeting with Robert was going well. Both Robert and John Paul were excited about our discoveries, and Robert was finding powerful connections with his own recent researches. Both brothers immediately saw the logic of the 366-degree circle arising from the Earth’s axial spins per solar orbit. But when we discussed the 233-732 relationship used at Thornborough to produce a circle with a circumference of 2 × 366 equal units, Robert raised his hand in the air, as though calling for a pause in the conversation.

  ‘These numbers – 732 arising from double 366 with 233 and pi. We have also found these in Egypt – firstly at Saqqara by Jean-Philppe Lauer,’ Robert said, as he looked down at the plans of the British henges. He jumped up and retrieved a copy of his book, The Egypt Code, from his bookshelves. He flicked through the pages and pressed the book flat before passing it for us to see

  The Saqqara pyramids are a few kilometres south of the Giza Plateau and some decades older. On a plan of the boundary wall Lauer had identified that the northern and southern walls of the boundary wall of the Djoser complex each had 2 × 366 panels. At first glance it appeared to be a ceremonial acknowledgement of a ‘magical’ number pattern rather than a practical application for astronomical purposes. But nonetheless, it was obvious that someone in Egypt knew about the importance of these values 100 years or so before the Giza trio were planned! This was getting very interesting.

  After several hours of conversation we set out to walk to a fish restaurant, some 3 km along the beach, to continue our wide-ranging discussion. The sun shone with the power of a good English summer’s day, and the food was as good as the conversation. We continued talking as the sun fell lower across the sea.

  As we walked back to Robert’s apartment, we wondered what he would make of hearing a new take on his famous Orion correlation theory. He might love it but, then again we were well aware that he might not.

  A Possible New Angle on the Orion Theory

  Without doubt Robert Bauval is ‘master of the Giza Plateau’ and one does not lightly tell him that he might be wrong. So we didn’t attempt to. But we did show him an argument for considering one significant adjustment to his famous theory.

  What we had found was based on our discovery that ancient cultures measured stars by timing their relative movements with pendulums. It seems that nobody, including Robert, had ever given a great deal of thought to how the pyramid builders of Giza had measured the relative position of the stars in order to map them so accurately onto the ground. It appears that most commentators have simply assumed the builders did it by looking upwards to gain a mental impression of the star group and then drawing the arrangement on a sheet of papyrus or a slate before evolving their awesome ground plan through artistic interpretation alone.

  In our opinion this simply would not work, or rather it would not work to the level of accuracy we knew existed in terms of the Giza pyramids and Orion’s Belt.

  Our years of work on prehistoric and ancient metrology had already taught us to respect these long-gone builders as true engineers, rather than casual artists. The magnificent quality of the Thornborough and Giza layouts screams out that there was heavy-duty science behind their unerring accuracy.

  Because stars as seen in the night sky are little more than ‘pin pricks’ of light, any two stars can be compared with any two objects on the ground at any arbitrary scale. But when three stars are compared to three terrestrial objects, unless there is a flawless fit, one has to decide which two are correct (as two always will be) so that the degree of inaccuracy for the placement of the third can be established. The standard way of comparing the three main Giza pyramids with the shape of the stars of Orion’s Belt, both by Robert and his critics, is to consider Khufu’s and Khafre’s pyramids as being the ‘correct’ ones and then arguing a smallish error in the placing of Menkaure’s pyramid (the southernmost and by far the smallest of the three).

  We are as certain as it is possible to be that this is not a correct assumption. Because the tool employed was the pendulum, and because we know from our findings at Thornborough and elsewhere that distances on the ground were direct translations of time in the sky, we knew that the outer two pyramids (Khafre and Menkaure) had to be positioned first and then the central pyramid of Khufu fitted in last.

  This is because, as described in Chapter 6, the period of time between the outer stars of Mintaka and Alnitak reaching a fixed point was measured in seconds as they rose above the horizon, which can then be translated into the same number of any units of length. The gap between the first and second, and the second and third, was gauged when the Orion’s Belt trio were level with the horizon (at their maximum altitude – exactly south). However, whilst the ancient observers could accurately gauge the ‘off-centredness’ of the middle star in horizontal terms, there was no way they could measure its vertical deviation from the straight line between the other two stars.

  This one element could only be estimated by eye alone.

  We would therefore expect these perfectionist pyramid-engineers to get every aspect of the ground plan extremely accurate – apart from the amount of deviation of Khafre’s pyramid to emulate the dogleg shape of the stars they were copying. The builders knew the precise point on the SW–NE ‘back sight’ line to place the middle pyramid, but not the 90-degree offset towards the northwest.

  We would therefore expect to find some level of error to be present on the ground plan in relation to this aspect – and this aspect alone. This is exactly what we found when we made a slight twist in the logic of Robert’s Orion correlation theory.

  Our meeting with Robert and John Paul had been wonderfully exhilarating and stimulating. But now we were to introduce the idea that we believed needed to be aired. It does not form any part of our core thesis – but we still had to share it.

  We put it to Robert that maybe there was a different way of looking at the Giza ground plan in the light of this one expected error. And, we suggested, it was a solution that fitted all of the available facts even better than anything discussed before.

  We had been sitting in the bar of our hotel in Giza, some months earlier, drinking ice-cold Egyptian beer whilst looking straight up at Khafre’s pyramid, when the idea began to develop. On that same day we had taken a long and close look at the reassembled pyramid boat housed near the Great Pyramid, and it seemed to us that the importance of this vessel, and of others like it, might have been underestimated by earlier Egyptologists.

  Seven boat pits have been found in the whole complex of Khufu at Giza, two of which are associated with the lesser so-called Queen’s Pyramids. These boat pits are very large – over 50 m long, 7 m wide and nearly 4 m deep. Whilst some of the pits have been found to be empty, two intact boats were discovered in 1954 by the young Egyptian archaeologist Kamal el-Mallakh. When one of the slabs was raised from the eastern pit, the planking of the great
boat was seen – it had been dismantled and carefully flat-packed four and a half millennia before. One of these Lebanese cedar boats had its 1,224 individual parts reassembled by Ahmed Youssef Mustafa during a period of some 10 years, and is now on display in a superb boat-shaped museum next to the Great Pyramid.

  In the absence of any ancient written records about these vessels, scholars have speculated about their purpose and meaning. According to the Egyptian Director of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, the boats to the south of the pyramid are solar boats in which the soul of the king symbolically travelled through the heavens with the Sun god. Others suggest that the pit, which lies parallel to the causeway, might have contained the funerary boat used to bring the king’s body to its final resting place. But that raises the question as to why the boat was not returned to other duties after completing this task, instead of being so carefully interred at Giza. It seems to us that the boats were placed in their pits for a supposed future purpose rather than because they were no longer needed.

  To us, it seems that Dr Hawass is probably quite close to the mark. As Egyptian religious beliefs developed, Pharaohs were buried along with artefacts necessary for use in the afterlife, and therefore is seems reasonable to assume that these boats were packed away so expertly for later use – for the dead king’s journey to the Duat, the realm of the dead that existed amongst the stars.

  Slightly later records from the pyramids of Saqqara tell us the way that ancient Egyptian kings thought about the journey to the afterlife – which was all about sailing to the stars. There is no doubt whatsoever that Orion’s Belt and Sirius were of special importance to the ancient Egyptians. Amongst the inscriptions found on the walls of the Saqqara pyramids is the following incantation:

  Be firm, Oh king, on the underside of the sky with the

  Beautiful Star upon the Bend of the Winding Waterway…

  The Beautiful Star of Isis is Sirius (Sopdet to the ancient Egyptians), which, at its heliacal rising at the summer solstice, marked the opening of the life-bringing Nile flood. This was the flooding that brought life back to the entire land of Egypt. It is, of course, to Sirius that the three stars of Orion’s Belt point.

  A few weeks after the annual inundation began, the swollen Nile would be lapping against the edge of the Giza Plateau. Anyone standing next to Khufu’s pyramid looking southwards, towards Sirius rising before dawn at this time of year, would see the light of the billion stars of the Milky Way reflecting on its surface so that the horizon itself melded into a continuous waterway, right from their feet and extending far up into the heavens. Could it be that the kings believed that their boats would set sail at the moment that Sirius broke above the waterway, leading the way for their voyage to the Duat? The Saqqara inscriptions seem to describe it, and the boats were ready for the journey.

  The Egyptians associated their gods with constellations, or specific astronomical bodies. The constellation Orion was considered to be a manifestation of Osiris, the god of death, rebirth, and the afterlife. The Milky Way represented the sky goddess Nut who gave birth to the Sun god Ra. The horizon had great significance to the Egyptians, since it was here that the Sun would both appear and disappear on its daily journey. The Sun itself was associated with a number of deities, depending on its position within the sky. The rising Sun was associated with Horus, the divine child of Osiris and Isis. The noon Sun was Ra, god on high, and the evening Sun was Atum, the creator god who lifted Pharaohs from their tombs to the stars.

  The red glow of the setting Sun was considered to be the blood of the Sun god as he ‘died’ and became associated with Osiris, god of death and rebirth. This led to the night being associated with death, and the dawn with rebirth and life.

  It seems to us that great kings such as Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure, who saw themselves as gods in life, expected to take up their new life, after earthly death, by travelling to the stars – the realm of the gods. But how did they expect to get there? According to the records left to us, the answer is by sailing down the Nile and past the horizon into the heavens and onwards to Orion.

  And in what did they expect to sail? Surely the boats, so carefully packed away next to the pyramids, provide a large and tangible clue? And the next question then has to be: How exactly did they envisage this journey happening?

  The Journey to the Duat

  As far as we are aware, there is no known Egyptian text that explicitly describes the anticipated structure of the world of the afterlife – the heaven amongst the stars. But the later Greek culture drew heavily on Egyptian ideas and they described the starry heavens as follows:

  The heaven is solid and made of air (mist) congealed by fire, like crystal, and encloses the fiery and air-like (contents) of the two hemispheres respectively.

  Aetius, II, 11, 2

  The fixed stars are attached to the crystal sphere; the planets are free.

  Aetius, II, 13, 2

  So, the Greeks considered that the stars were attached to a crystal sphere that was fixed above and parallel to the surface of the Earth. It seems highly probable that the earlier Egyptians saw things in a similar way.

  We put it to Robert Bauval that the ancient Egyptians may have built the pyramids as an earthly connection to the stars of Orion’s Belt. Not as a symbolic copy of the star arrangement in honour of Osiris, but a physical star-to-pyramid correlation – a direct conduit between the realm of men and the realm of the gods. The stages of the journey might have been something like this:

  1. The three pyramids were carefully constructed to fit the stars – to effectively ‘plug into’ them. This was achieved by taking careful measurement of the star group, using a pendulum to time the gaps between the rising stars. After this, the timed swings of the pendulum were converted into pendulum lengths on the ground. The centre of each pyramid corresponded to the point of each star.

  2. Each pyramid, and therefore star, was associated with one of the three kings (father, son and grandson). The largest pyramid, nearest the Nile is Khufu’s, the next Khafre’s and the smallest one, Menkaure’s.

  3. The first star of Orion’s belt to rise above the horizon is Mintaka. Khufu was the first king to ‘rise’ at birth and to eventually ‘set’ at death. The second star is Alnilam and therefore corresponds to the next king, Khafre, and the third to rise is Alnitak, which makes it Menkaure’s star. (This has an obvious logic – but it does reverse the sequence as described by Robert Bauval.)

  The evidence strongly suggests that the ancient Egyptian kings believed that the stars were on a plane parallel to the Earth and that they could stand in heaven and look down upon the land of mortal men. This explains why the pyramids were designed to correlate with the stars of Orion’s Belt as viewed from heaven rather than from the surface of the Earth.

  Figure 15. The ‘crystal sphere’

  4. The boats may well have brought the bodies of the deceased kings to the pyramids, but then they were dismantled and stored in the ‘graves’ prepared for them. The bodies of Khufu and Khafre were taken to their pyramids as they died 34 years apart. Then when Menkaure died 22 years later, the three kings were ready for their journey.

  5. The ‘spiritual boats’, in other words the ‘essence’ of the boats that had been so carefully created and buried on the site, were assembled at the jetty in front of the pyramid complex in the same order as the pyramids. The dead kings set out to the stars with Khufu sailing south down the Nile in his mystical boat, followed by Khufu and then Menkaure.

  6. The journey began after dark and, as Sirius rose, the blaze of the Milky Way was perfectly reflected in the river to create a sparkling and uninterrupted waterway from Earth to heaven. Khufu’s boat, representing Mintaka, was first to cross the horizon. The three boats rose one after the other into the heavenly waterway and sailed in sequence up the Milky Way towards Orion’s Belt.

  7. They sailed onto the plain of the stars that was parallel to the Earth but far above it; where even the mightiest of birds could not fly. Here the brilli
ant white stars existed on a celestial ‘ground’ – just like the equally brilliant white pyramids below them.

  If this explanation were correct, it would mean that the relationship between the stars of Orion’s Belt is different to Robert’s original correlation. In this case the pyramids would be reversed and inverted in terms of the stars they represent. Instead of simply looking at Orion’s Belt from an Earth perspective, the key to the problem would be to look from the heavens downwards. From the parallel realm of the gods the deceased god-kings of Egypt could gaze down on the nation they once ruled.

  We think that our revision of Robert’s Orion correlation theory has the benefit of fitting all of the available facts. Most particularly it largely removes the apparent inaccuracy in the layout of the pyramids in relation to the three stars – except for the anticipated tiny error in the deviation of the ‘dog-leg’. We explained our idea and Robert was not slow to respond.

  ‘This cannot be correct,’ he said, waving his hand from side to side. ‘You are proposing a level of accuracy in the position of the pyramids relative to each other that could not be achieved.’

  We could not help but agree with his reasoning and yet the lateral error disappeared completely when our slight alteration of Robert’s evidence was introduced.

  ‘That is indeed strange,’ John Paul said with a nod and raised eyebrows. Perhaps he shared our view that it was an odd argument to suggest our explanation was wrong because it fitted the known facts ‘too’ well.

  The boats of the kings were believed to sail to the afterlife in the order of the pyramids – Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure. They sailed down the Nile in order and at the horizon, where the Milky Way merged into its own reflection, the craft lifted off to sail up the ‘heavenly Nile’. They crossed the sky and arrived at Orion’s Belt so that Khufu became one with Mintaka (the first to rise), Khafre became Alnilam, and Menkaure was Alnitak.