cases to pre-dynastic times—that had been mysteriously hollowed out of
a range of materials such as diorite, basalt, quartz crystal and
metamorphic schist.17
For example, more than 30,000 such vessels had been found in the
chambers beneath the Third Dynasty Step Pyramid of Zoser at Saqqara.18
That meant that they were at least as old as Zoser himself (i.e. around
2650 BC19). Theoretically, they could have been even older than that,
14 Ibid., pp. 74-5.
15 The Pyramids: An Enigma Solved, p. 8.
16 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 75.
17 The Pyramids: An Enigma Solved, p. 118.
18 Egypt: Land of the Pharaohs, Time-Life Books, 1992, p. 51.
19 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.
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because identical vessels had been found in pre-dynastic strata dated to
4000 BC and earlier,20 and because the practice of handing down
treasured heirlooms from generation to generation had been deeply
ingrained in Egypt since time immemorial.
Whether they were made in 2500 BC or in 4000 BC or even earlier, the
stone vessels from the Step Pyramid were remarkable for their
workmanship, which once again seemed to have been accomplished by
some as yet unimagined (and, indeed, almost unimaginable) tool.
Why unimaginable? Because many of the vessels were tall vases with
long, thin, elegant necks and widely flared interiors, often incorporating
fully hollowed-out shoulders. No instrument yet invented was capable of
carving vases into shapes like these, because such an instrument would
have had to have been narrow enough to have passed through the necks
and strong enough (and of the right shape) to have scoured out the
shoulders and the rounded interiors. And how could sufficient upward
and outward pressure have been generated and applied within the vases
to achieve these effects?
The tall vases were by no means the only enigmatic vessels unearthed
from the Pyramid of Zoser, and from a number of other archaic sites.
There were monolithic urns with delicate ornamental handles left
attached to their exteriors by the carvers. There were bowls, again with
extremely narrow necks like the vases, and with widely flared, pot-bellied
interiors. There were also open bowls, and almost microscopic vials, and
occasional strange wheel-shaped objects cut out of metamorphic schist
with inwardly curled edges planed down so fine that they were almost
translucent.21 In all cases what was really perplexing was the precision
with which the interiors and exteriors of these vessels had been made to
correspond—curve matching curve—over absolutely smooth, polished
surfaces with no tool marks visible.
There was no technology known to have been available to the Ancient
Egyptians capable of achieving such results. Nor, for that matter, would
any stone-carver today be able to match them, even if he were working
with the best tungsten-carbide tools. The implication, therefore, is that an
unknown or secret technology had been put to use in Ancient Egypt.
Ceremony of the sarcophagus
Standing in the King’s Chamber, facing west—the direction of death
amongst both the Ancient Egyptians and the Maya—I rested my hands
lightly on the gnarled granite edge of the sarcophagus which
Egyptologists insist had been built to house the body of Khufu. I gazed
20 For example, see Cyril Aldred, Egypt to the End of the Old Kingdom, Thames &
Hudson, London, 1988, p. 25.
21 Ibid., p. 57. The relevant artefacts are in the Cairo Museum.
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into its murky depths where the dim electric lighting of the chamber
seemed hardly to penetrate and saw specks of dust swirling in a golden
cloud.
It was just a trick of light and shadow, of course, but the King’s
Chamber was full of such illusions. I remembered that Napoleon
Bonaparte had paused to spend a night alone here during his conquest of
Egypt in the late eighteenth century. The next morning he had emerged
pale and shaken, having experienced something which had profoundly
disturbed him but about which he never afterwards spoke.22
Had he tried to sleep in the sarcophagus?
Acting on impulse, I climbed into the granite coffer and lay down, face
upwards, my feet pointed towards the south and my head to the north.
Napoleon was a little guy, so he must have fitted comfortably. There
was plenty of room for me too. But had Khufu been here as well?
I relaxed and tried not to worry about the possibility of one of the
pyramid guards coming in and finding me in this embarrassing and
probably illegal position. Hoping that I would remain undisturbed for a
few minutes, I folded my hands across my chest and gave voice to a
sustained low-pitched tone—something I had tried out several times
before at other points in the King’s Chamber. On those occasions, in the
centre of the floor, I had noticed that the walls and ceiling seemed to
collect the sound, to gather and to amplify it and project it back at me so
that I could sense the returning vibrations through my feet and scalp and
skin.
Now in the sarcophagus I was aware of very much the same effect,
although seemingly amplified and concentrated many times over. It was
like being in the sound-box of some giant, resonant musical instrument
designed to emit for ever just one reverberating note. The sound was
intense and quite disturbing. I imagined it rising out of the coffer and
bouncing off the red granite walls and ceiling of the King’s Chamber,
shooting up through the northern and southern ‘ventilation’ shafts and
spreading across the Giza plateau like a sonic mushroom cloud.
With this ambitious vision in my mind, and with the sound of my lowpitched note echoing in my ears and causing the sarcophagus to vibrate
around me, I closed my eyes. When I opened them a few minutes later it
was to behold a distressing sight: six Japanese tourists of mixed ages
and sexes had congregated around the sarcophagus—two of them
standing to the east, two to the west and one each to the north and
south.
They all looked ... amazed. And I was amazed to see them. Because of
recent attacks by armed Islamic extremists there were now almost no
tourists at Giza and I had expected to have the King’s Chamber to myself.
What does one do in a situation like this?
22 Reported in P. W. Roberts, River in the Desert: Modern Travels in Ancient Egypt,
Random House, New York and Toronto, 1993, p. 115.
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Gathering as much dignity as I could muster, I stood upright, smiling
and dusting myself off. The Japanese stepped back and I climbed out of
the sarcophagus. Cultivating a businesslike manner, as though I did
things like this all the time, I strolled to the point two-thirds of the way
along the northern wall of the King’s Chamber where the entrance to
what Egyptologists refer to as the ‘northern ventilation shaft’ is located,
and began to exami
ne it minutely.
Some 8 inches wide by 9 inches high, it was, I knew, more than 200 feet
in length and emerged into open air at the pyramid’s 103rd course of
masonry. Presumably by design rather than by accident, it pointed to the
circumpolar regions of the northern heavens at an angle of 32° 30’. This,
in the Pyramid Age around 2500 BC, would have meant that it was
directed on the upper culmination of Alpha Draconis, a prominent star in
the constellation of Draco.23
Much to my relief the Japanese rapidly completed their tour of the
King’s Chamber and left, stooping, without a backward glance. As soon
as they had gone I crossed over to the other side of the room to take a
look at the southern shaft. Since I had last been here some months
before, its appearance had changed horribly. Its mouth now contained a
massive electrical air-conditioning unit installed by Rudolf Gantenbrink,
who even now was turning his attentions to the neglected shafts of the
Queen’s Chamber.
Since Egyptologists were satisfied that the King’s Chamber shafts had
been built for ventilation purposes, they saw nothing untoward in using
modern technology to improve the efficiency of this task. Yet wouldn’t
horizontal shafts have been more effective than sloping ones if their
primary purpose had been ventilation, and easier to build?24 It was
therefore unlikely to be an accident that the southern shaft of the King’s
Chamber targeted the southern heavens at 45°. During the Pyramid Age
this was the location for the meridian transit of Zeta Orionis, the lowest
of the three stars of Orion’s Belt25—an alignment, I was to discover in due
course, that would turn out to be of the utmost significance for future
pyramid research.
The game-master
Now that I had the Chamber to myself again, I walked over to the western
wall, on the far side of the sarcophagus, and turned to face east.
The huge room had an endless capacity to generate indications of
mathematical game-playing. For example, its height (19 feet 1 inch) was
23 Robert Bauval, Discussions in Egyptology No. 29, 1994.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid. See also The Orion Mystery, p. 172.
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exactly half of the length of its floor diagonal (38 feet 2 inches).26
Moreover, since the King’s Chamber formed a perfect 1 x 2 rectangle,
was it conceivable that the pyramid builders were unaware that they had
also made it express and exemplify the ‘golden section’?
Known as phi, the golden section was another irrational number like pi
that could not be worked out arithmetically. Its value was the square root
of 5 plus 1 divided by 2, equivalent to 1.61803.27 This proved to be the
‘limiting value of the ratio between successive numbers in the Fibonacci
series—the series of numbers beginning 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13—in which
each term is the sum of the two previous terms.’28
Phi could also be obtained schematically by dividing a line A-B at a
point C in such a way that the whole line A-B was longer than the first
part, A-C, in the same proportion as the first part, A-C, was longer than
the remainder, C-B.29 This proportion, which had been proven particularly
harmonious and agreeable to the eye, had supposedly been first
discovered by the Pythagorean Greeks, who incorporated it into the
Parthenon at Athens. There is absolutely no doubt, however, that phi
illustrated and obtained at least 2000 years previously in the King’s
Chamber of the Great Pyramid at Giza.
26 Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 117; The Great Pyramid: Your Personal Guide, p.
64.
27 John Ivimy, The Sphinx and the Megaliths, Abacus, London, 1976, p. 118.
28 Ibid.
29 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 191.
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At the very beginning of its Dynastic history, Egypt inherited a
system of measures from unknown predecessors. Expressed in these
ancient measures, the floor dimensions of the King’s Chamber (34 ft.
4” x 17 ft. 2”) work out at exactly 20 x 10 royal cubits’, while the
height of the side walls to the ceiling is exactly 11.18 royal cubits.
The semi-diagonal of the floor (A-B) is also exactly 11.18 royal cubits
and can be ‘swung up’ to C to confirm the height of the chamber. Phi
is defined mathematically as the square root of 5 + 1 + 2, i.e. 1.618. Is
it a coincidence that the distance C-D (i.e. the wall height of the King’s
Chamber plus half the width of its floor) equals 16.18 royal cubits,
thus incorporating the essential digits of phi?
To understand how it is necessary to envisage the rectangular floor of
the chamber as being divided into two imaginary squares of equal size,
with the side length of each square being given a value of 1. If either of
these two squares were then split in half, thus forming two new
rectangles, and if the diagonal of the rectangle nearest to the centreline
of the King’s Chamber were swung down to the base, the point where its
tip touched the base would be phi, or 1.618, in relation to the side length
(i.e., 1) of the original square.30 (An alternative way of obtaining phi, also
built into the King’s Chamber’s dimensions, is illustrated on the previous
page.)
The Egyptologists considered all this was pure chance. Yet the pyramid
builders had done nothing by chance. Whoever they had been, I found it
30 Ibid. See also Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, pp. 117-19.
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hard to imagine more systematic and mathematically minded people.
I’d had quite enough of their mathematical games for one day. As I left
the King’s Chamber, however, I could not forget that it was located in line
with the 50th course of the Great Pyramid’s masonry at a height of
almost 150 feet above the ground.31 This meant, as Flinders Petrie
pointed out with some astonishment, that the builders had managed to
place it ‘at the level where the vertical section of the Pyramid was halved,
where the area of the horizontal section was half that of the base, where
the diagonal from corner to corner was equal to the length of the base,
and where the width of the face was equal to half the diagonal of the
base’.32
Confidently and efficiently fooling around with more than six million
tons of stone, creating galleries and chambers and shafts and corridors
more or less at will, achieving near-perfect symmetry, near-perfect right
angles, and near-perfect alignments to the cardinal points, the mysterious
builders of the Great Pyramid had found the time to play a great many
other tricks as well with the dimensions of the vast monument.
Why did their minds work this way? What had they been trying to say or
do? And why, so many thousands of years after it was built, did the
monument still exert a magnetic influence upon so many people, from so
many different walks of life, who came into contact with it?
There was a Sphinx in the neighbourhood, so I de
cided that I would put
these riddles to It ...
31 The Great Pyramid: Your Personal Guide, p. 64.
32 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 93.
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Chapter 39
Place of the Beginning
Giza, Egypt, 16 March 1993, 3:30 p.m.
It was mid afternoon by the time I left the Great Pyramid. Retracing the
route that Santha and I had followed the night before when we had
climbed the monument, I walked eastwards along the northern face,
southwards along the flank of the eastern face, clambered over mounds
of rubble and ancient tombs that clustered closely in this part of the
necropolis, and came out on to the sand-covered limestone bedrock of
the Giza plateau, which sloped down towards the south and east.
At the bottom of this long gentle slope, about half a kilometre from the
south-eastern corner of the Great Pyramid, the Sphinx crouched in his
rock-hewn pit. Sixty-six feet high and more than 240 feet long, with a
head measuring 13 feet 8 inches wide,1 he was, by a considerable margin,
the largest single piece of sculpture in the world—and the most
renowned:
A shape with lion body and the head of a man
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.2
Approaching the monument from the north-west I crossed the ancient
causeway that connected the Second Pyramid with the so-called Valley
Temple of Khafre, a most unusual structure located just 50 feet south of
the Sphinx itself on the eastern edge of the Giza necropolis.
This Temple had long been believed to be far older than the time of
Khafre. Indeed throughout much of the nineteenth century the consensus
among scholars was that it had been built in remote prehistory, and had
nothing to do with the architecture of dynastic Egypt.3 What changed all
that was the discovery, buried within the Temple precincts, of a number
of inscribed statues of Khafre. Most were pretty badly smashed, but one,
found upside down in a deep pit in an antechamber, was almost intact.
Life-sized, and exquisitely carved out of black, jewel-hard diorite, it
showed the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh seated on his throne and gazing with
serene indifference towards infinity.
At this point the razor-sharp reasoning of Egyptology was brought to
bear, and a solution of almost awe-inspiring brilliance was worked out:
Fingerprints of the Gods Page 47