Journeys to the Mythical Past

by Zecharia Sitchin

  Indeed, inscriptions (fig. 13) on a stone artifact belonging to Cheops—in which his name Khufu is clearly written in hieroglyphics—imply that the Great Pyramid had already existed in his time, and so did the Sphinx! In this monument, known as the Inventory Stela, Khufu took credit for restoring a shrine to the goddess Isis, “Mistress of the Pyramid.” He does not take credit for the pyramid itself, clearly considering it a structure belonging to gods, not mortals; and he states that the shrine stood “beside the house of the Sphinx”—the very Sphinx which according to Egyptological tenets was erected (or carved out) by Khufu’s successor Chefra . . .

  Figure 12

  Figure 13

  In fact, depictions of the Sphinx (as reported by Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie in The Royal Tombs of the Earliest Dynasties, 1901) were already found on stone tablets belonging to the earliest Pharaohs Menes-Narmer and Zer (fig. 14). Clearly, the Sphinx too had already existed when Khufu and Chefra ascended their thrones.

  Figure 14

  If the Giza pyramids (and the Sphinx) had already existed when Pharaohs began to reign, who was there to build them? The answer comes to us from the Near East’s earliest civilization, that of Sumer. The Sumerians were quite aware of the unique edifices at Giza, describing them in texts dealing with the Pyramid Wars and depicting them on cylinder seals (fig. 15a), including one commemorating the victory of the god Ninurta by showing his Divine Eagle surmounting the two large pyramids (fig. 15b).

  The story of the “Pyramid Wars” is told in The Wars of Gods and Men. The story of how the Giza pyramids and Sphinx came to be built, by the gods, as vital components of their post-Diluvial Spaceport, has been told in my book The Stairway to Heaven.

  Gods, not men, built the Giza pyramids as terminals for the Landing Corridor that was anchored on the twin peaks of Ararat in the north and on two natural peaks in the Sinai peninsula in the southeast (fig. 16); absent such peaks at the northeastern terminus, the gods first erected the small pyramid as a test of structural stability and functionality, then built the other larger two—equipping the Great Pyramid with pulsating guidance equipment in the unique upper innards.

  Figure 15

  We can even explain the difficult slope angle of 52° by the fact that it was the “secret number” of the Divine Architect, Thoth (whom the Sumerians called Ningishzidda)—a number that linked the Great Pyramid’s base length and height to a circle’s π. Yet with all that, Egyptologists have remained unmovable in the Khufu-Chefra-Menkaura sequence. How and when did this tenet originate?

  Figure 16

  Spending weeks at a time in the British Museum Library in London, poring over countless books on the subject backward—from the latest to the earliest, I found that all the textbooks reported that Herodotus, the Greek historian-geographer, was told so by his guides when he visited Egypt in the fifth century B.C. Some textbooks asserted that the royal name of Khufu was actually found inscribed within the Great Pyramid; they also used to state that a coffin lid bearing the name “Menkaura” was discovered inside the Third Pyramid. Could anyone argue with that?

  The fact that later textbooks ceased referring to the information, given in earlier books, about the Menkaura coffin lid intrigued me. Why was such physical evidence no longer mentioned? Searching for an answer in issues of scholarly journals, I unearthed the whole story. The original find, of the coffin lid and skeletal remains of the Pharaoh, was made in 1837 by two Englishmen who resifted debris inside the Third Pyramid. Textbooks accepted this as proof of the pyramid builder’s identity for more than a century—until modern carbon dating methods established that the coffin lid was not from 2600 B.C. but from circa 660 B.C. (when a later Pharaoh also called himself Menkaura), and the skeletal remains from the first or second century A.D.

  The 1837 “find” was therefore dropped from textbooks (and the British Museum removed the coffin lid from its catalogue); but the circumstances intrigued me. Why did all previous explorers inside this small pyramid miss the remarkable physical evidence? Also, since the lid and the skeletal remains were from totally different periods, how did they happen to rest together? Did the “finders” perpetrate a deliberate archaeological fraud? Their names, I learned, were Howard Vyse and John Perring; they were quite a team, excavating almost at will in Giza. Then, joined by a wheeler-dealer named J. R. Hill, it was the same Howard Vyse who discovered the name “Khufu” written inside the Great Pyramid, where—you guessed it—none was found before . . .

  That realization, that an archaeological fraud was perpetrated in the small Third Pyramid, launched me on a course that led to question the only “proof” of the Khufu-built-it tenet of Egyptology.

  Howard Vyse was a retired British colonel, a “black sheep” of a wealthy family, who, visiting Egypt in 1835, became infatuated with Egyptian antiquities. Though the Firman (exploration permit) that was issued to Vyse by the Egyptian authorities named the British Consul in Cairo (a Col. Campbell) as a trustee, Vyse made his own hiring decisions; and in Giza he entrusted the search to one Battista Caviglia, who made important finds at the Sphinx and assured Vyse that discovering the elusive hidden Treasure Chamber in the Great Pyramid was just a matter of time and money. Vyse provided the money and left Egypt to tour the Levant. He returned two years later, only to be told that the search had led nowhere. Starting to run out of both money and time, Vyse took matters into his own hands, moved to Giza, and enlisted a mix of helpers—some with Egyptological experience (such as C. Sloane and J. Perring), and some local wheeler-dealers (a Mr. Hill, a Mr. Mash, a Mr. Raven).

  A detailed day-by-day diary that he kept (later published as Operations Carried On at the Pyramids of Gizeh) records the desperation as nothing worthwhile was found. The British Consul and other dignitaries started to visit the site, wondering where the efforts were leading. One of the problems was the need to constantly find new workmen, since those hired developed eyesores as they hacked and hammered inside the dust-filled pyramid; it got so bad that, on Col. Campbell’s intervention, the British sent a team to build an eye hospital in Giza. As the year 1837 began and his funds were running out, the frustrated Vyse started to use gunpowder in order to blast his way inside the Great Pyramid; he hired an English stonemason, who had come to Egypt for the eye hospital project, to handle the detonations.

  His last resort were narrow spaces above the King’s Chamber, one of which (“Davison’s Chamber”) was discovered by Nathaniel Davison in 1765. The gunpowder blasts revealed that there was a cavity above Davison’s Chamber; forcing his way up, Vyse discovered a similar space above Davison’s. Like Davison’s, it was totally devoid of any decoration or inscription. Vyse named it Wellington’s Chamber in honor of his favorite war hero, and had his assistant Hill inscribe this name inside the narrow chamber with red paint. Continuing the use of gunpowder as his men moved farther up, Vyse discovered two more similar empty spaces; he named them in honor of Lord Nelson and Lady Arbuthnot—names recorded by Mr. Hill in the usual red paint. Then he reached the vaulted cavity at the top, naming it Campbell’s Chamber in honor of his consular patron.

  All the “chambers of construction” (as he called them—they are now called “Relieving Chambers”) were bare and empty—no Pharaonic remains, no treasure—just black dust on the uneven floors. But on reentering the chambers (Mr. Hill, Mr. Perring, Mr. Mash kept going in), “quarry marks” in red paint were noticed (fig. 17).

  It was in those days of despair and desperation that a major discovery was made that assured Vyse’s place in the annals of Egyptology: Among the quarry marks were several cartouches that spelled out royal names, including that of Khufu! (fig. 18a, b)

  The British and Austrian consuls in Cairo were invited to witness the discovery; Mr. Hill copied the inscriptions on parchment sheets, and all present authenticated them with their signatures. The documents were then sent to the British Museum in London, and the unprecedented discovery was announced for the whole world to know. Since no one had entered those upper chambers from the
time when the pyramid was erected, here was unchallenged proof of its builder’s name!

  Vyse’s find has remained the only evidence for the Khufu–Great Pyramid connection. But while textbooks state so unquestioningly, it appears that at the time, experts (including the British Museum’s Samuel Birch and the great German Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius) were uneasy about the inscriptions’ script—it was one that was introduced in ancient Egypt much later—and questioned whether they really spelled out correctly the name Khufu (it looked like two different royal names were actually inscribed).

  As I was poring over Vyse’s printed diary, something odd struck me: The royal name he showed was inscribed differently than on the Inventory Stela; instead of diagonal lines (a “sieve”) inside a circle which reads KH (and thus KH-U-F-U), Vyse’s finds were written with a circle with just a dot inside (fig. 19). That reads not KH but RA, the sacred name of Egypt’s supreme god. Thus, the name Vyse reported was not KHufu, but RA-u-f-u . . .

  Figure 17

  Figure 18

  In 1978, visiting the British Museum, I asked to see the Vyse parchments. It took some doing, as no one had asked for them as far as anyone could recall. But the Hill Facsimiles (as they were catalogued) were found and shown to me—a bundle tied with yellowing-white ribbon. The authenticated parchments were there, the way they reached the museum more than a century earlier; and the misspelling was also there: In no instance was the “Kh” inscribed correctly as a sieve with diagonal lines; instead there was a dot or a smudge inside a circle, spelling “Ra.” Could it be that someone, in antiquity, had used the name of the great god RA in vain—an unforgivable sacrilege, a blasphemy punishable by death?

  Figure 19

  As I read the diary entries again, the words “red paint” kept jumping out of the pages—as when Mr. Hill used it to inscribe the names “Lord Wellington,” “Lady Arbuthnot,” ”Lord Nelson.” I was struck by a statement in Perring’s own memoirs (The Pyramids of Gizeh) that the red paint used for the ancient inscriptions “was a composition of red ochre called by the Arabs moghrah which is still in use.” Then Perring added the observation on the paint’s quality: “Such is the state of preservation of the marks in the quarries that it is difficult to distinguish the work of yesterday from one of three thousand years” (emphasis mine). Was he voicing his own astonishment about how fresh the red paint markings looked—after 4,500 years!—or was he offering an explanation for the odd phenomenon?

  As I went back to Vyse’s day-by-day diaries, the entries made clear that the “quarry marks” (as Vyse called them) were not discovered when the chambers were first entered; and that it was Mr. Hill or Mr. Perring—not Vyse himself—who were first to notice the red-paint markings on subsequent visits. And then the thought struck me: Could the team that perpetrated the fraud in the Third Pyramid have also engaged in a forgery inside the Great Pyramid—“discovering” inscriptions where absolutely none have been found before?

  Wasn’t it odd, I thought, that for centuries no markings of any kind were found by anyone, anywhere, in the pyramid, not even in Davison’s Chamber above the King’s Chamber—and only Vyse found such markings where only he first entered?

  Based on Vyse’s own diary entries, the accusing finger pointed to Mr. Hill as the culprit, and I suggested that it was on the night of May 28, 1837, that he entered the pyramid with brush and red paint and simulated the royal name. The Great Pyramid Discovery was a great fraud, an archaeological forgery.

  Without the “Khufu” inscription, Egyptologists remain without any tangible evidence for naming him as the builder of the Great Pyramid—and for that matter of Chefra and Menkaura as the builders of the two other Giza pyramids. The evidence that does exist shows that these pyramids and the Sphinx had preceded the Pharaohs; and the only ones who were there millennia earlier, who had the technology, who had the reason for erecting these pyramids—were the Anunnaki.

  Convinced that that is what had happened, I detailed the evidence in my 1980 book The Stairway to Heaven.

  The forgery conclusion caused a minor sensation. Several dailies (among them the Washington Times, the Pittsburgh Press) and magazines picked up the story, some even at length, some even embellishing the report with a cartoon (fig. 20). There were radio interviews. But the Egyptological community ignored it—and it took me awhile to understand why: It was one thing to suggest that a questionable inscription was a forgery; it was quite another thing to expect Egyptologists to acknowledge that the pyramids were built by “Extraterrestrials” . . .

  In May 1983, three years after The Stairway to Heaven was published, I received an astonishing letter. It was from a Mr. Walter M. Allen of Pittsburgh, Pa. “I have read your book,” he wrote. “What you say about the forgery in the Cheops Pyramid was not new to me.” His great-grandfather, he wrote, was an eyewitness to the forgery!

  Figure 20

  “I have your letter of May 7th and am literally flabbergasted,” I wrote him back. “That my conclusion could be supported by a virtual eyewitness was beyond my wildest expectations!”

  As the story unfolded, it turned out that Mr. Allen’s great-grandfather, Humphries W. Brewer, was the very stonemason from England whom Col. Vyse had hired. A civil engineer and master mason, he came to Egypt to assist a Dr. Naylor who was building an eye hospital for the local workmen. When the project was discontinued, Humphries was hired by Vyse to supervise the blasting inside the pyramid. He used to write regularly home, describing to his father back in Wiltshire, England, what was happening in Giza. In one of the letters he gave his family the sad news that he was dismissed from his job, and told how and why: He witnessed Mr. Hill go into the pyramid with red paint and brush, supposedly to paint over ancient markings, but actually to paint new ones. When the young stonemason objected, he was fired and banned from the site. “He did not get along with Perring and Raven because of the events . . . he trusted the judgment of Caviglia and Col. Campbell,” Mr. Allen added in his letter. He signed it “Walter M. Allen, AFTER 150 YEARS” (capital letters his own).

  How did he know all that? In 1848 the family moved from England to the United States, settling in upstate New York; they brought with them family records and memorabilia, including Humphries Brewer’s letters from Egypt. In the 1950s Mr. Allen, realizing time was running out, started to visit family elders still living, recording what they recalled about the family’s history. The sources included his mother, two daughters of Humphries (Mary Brewer Christie and Rebecca Brewer Allen), an aunt Nell, an uncle Col. Jos Walker, M.D. A radio buff, Mr. Allen used the empty pages in his radio logbook to write down what they said. Some of the recollections turned to the time his great-grandfather was in Egypt, hired to use gunpowder inside the Great Pyramid, and what he had witnessed.

  I asked Mr. Allen for any documentary evidence he had. He said that he would ask around for the letters, but would send me in the meantime photocopies of his logbook entries, which he did.

  An entry dated Sat. Oct. 9, 1954 (fig. 21—here made public for the first time) recorded a conversation with his mother and refers to a visit with Nell Pattington in Corning, N.Y., who “had some of Humfreys letters & Wm. Brewers letters from England. Got them from her father Wm. Marchant Brewer.” The entry included the following:

  Humfrey received prize for bridge he designed in Vienna over Danube. H. went to Egypt 1837, British Medical Serv. to Egypt . . . They were to build hospital in Cairo for Arabs with severe eye afflictions. Dr. Naylor took Humfrey along. Treatment not successful, hospital not built. He joined a Col. Visse exploring Gizeh pyramids. Rechecked dimensions 2 pyramids. Had dispute with Raven and Hill about painted marks in pyramid. Faint marks were repainted, some were new . . . Humfrey went to Syria & Jerusalem to see holy city few weeks later. Had words with a Mr. Hill and Visse when he left. He agreed with a Col. Colin Campbell & another Geno Cabilia. Humfrey went back to England late 1837.

  I felt a chill when I read these lines. Written in 1954—more than twenty years before m
y book was published—they resurrected the players of the 1837 drama: Vyse, Campbell, Caviglia, Hill, Raven, Dr. Naylor—and clearly identified the culprits as Hill and Raven.

  Other entries, and a letter from an uncle, confirmed the basic facts regarding Humphries Brewer, who he was, his time in Egypt, his dispute with “Visse and Hill,” and his banishment from Giza, adding a tidbit that the German Egyptologist Richard Karl Lepsius invited Humphries to join him when he wanted to examine the “marks” inside the pyramid—but both were refused permission by Vyse.

  Though Mr. Allen’s search for the bundle of Humphries’ letters was unsuccessful, the above quoted lines remain an authentic, unbiased eyewitness testament to what had happened: “Faint marks were repainted, some were new.”

  Some months after the above exchanges with Mr. Allen, I was invited to be interviewed (via long-distance phone) on a talk show on a Pittsburgh radio station. As the interview turned to the pyramid forgery, the host said: I have a surprise for you—we have Mr. Walter Allen in the studio!

  Figure 21

  Continuing the interview with both of us, the host asked Mr. Allen to restate the facts that I described as he knew them—and he did. No doubt was left: The forgery in the Great Pyramid was confirmed by an eyewitness.

  In spite of a segment in the TV program Ancient Mysteries, more articles, and references to the forgery evidence in several books by non-academics, no headway was made in Establishment circles. But my persistent curiosity—or was it Fate?—did not let the matter rest there.