same Egyptologists who readily ascribed immense importance to Vyse’s
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.
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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
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
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.
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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
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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 ...
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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 kilometres 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.
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
1 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.
2 The Orion Mystery.
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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.
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
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.
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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, chocolatecoloured 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
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.
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stones being effortlessly levitated by priests or magicians through the
utterance of ‘words of power’?9
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.
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