Ancient Traces

by Michael Baigent

  With recent work checking the alignments of the ‘airshafts’ Bauval was able to determine the stars to which they pointed, and when.

  Around 2450 BC, about the date of the building of the Great Pyramid, the southern shaft leading from the King’s Chamber pointed at the bottom star in Orion’s Belt, the pyramids’ equivalent. The southern shaft in the deeper Queen’s Chamber pointed at Sirius.

  Bauval wondered about the use of the Great Pyramid. A shaft from the Queen’s Chamber pointing to Sirius, equated with Isis; a shaft from the King’s Chamber pointed at Orion, equated with Osiris. The king and queen, Osiris and Isis, in Egyptian mythology were married, producing a son, Horus. Horus was said to have been the first demigod ruler of Egypt long before the time of the pharaohs. The ‘Followers of Horus’ were the initiates mentioned in the Pyramid Texts. The early pharaohs all had ‘Horus’ as part of their names. Could the Great Pyramid have been used in some kind of ritual involving a union of the terrestrial and the stellar equivalents? A union of the above and the below?

  But there is one structure at Giza which Bauval did not at first consider: the Sphinx, whose gaze is fixed inexorably and for ever towards the eastern horizon, towards the point where the sun rises at the spring equinox.

  In a later joint book Hancock and Bauval put forward a date when three astronomical events would occur at the moment of sunrise at the spring equinox: the sun and the constellation Leo would rise, gazed at by the Sphinx; the star Sirius would be just above the horizon; the constellation of Orion would be at its very lowest point in its 25,920 years precessional cycle.

  This time, Bauval and Hancock claim, is the ‘first time’ referred to in the ancient Egyptian texts, when Osiris first gave civilization and kingship to Egypt. They place it at about 10,500 BC.40

  That is, of course, if the lowest point in a cycle can be taken as a beginning. Most astrologers, ancient and modern, would rather take the highest point – its culmination – as being the end of one cycle and the start of another. This would put Hancock and Bauval’s ‘first time’ in fact midway through the cycle. A new cycle would not begin until around AD 2460.

  Nevertheless, it is fair to say that if Hancock and Bauval are correct with their identification and interpretation, then the current theories of Egyptology are in very serious trouble indeed. However, our enthusiasm for such delightful iconoclasm must be tempered. There is one major difficulty which Hancock and Bauval fail to confront with any conviction. They do not give sufficient attention to the crucial difference between understanding a text or a legend literally and understanding it symbolically.

  As we shall see in the next chapter, it is beneath the veil of symbolism that the deepest mysteries of ancient Egypt have long been hidden.

  10

  The Mysteries of Ancient Egypt

  The three Pyramids of Giza form what must be the most recognizable image of Egypt and, indeed, the ancient world. Yet they are not alone; it comes as something of a surprise to most people to learn that there are around ninety pyramids in Egypt. Most range south from Giza, down the western bank of the Nile for about seventy miles. Beyond these, others stand much further south, at Abydos, for example, at Edfu, Elephantine Island and other sites.

  Quite a number are in ruins and none is as large as the Great Pyramid. Even so, many are impressive monuments to ancient building skill. The very first is the 204-feet-high stepped pyramid of the pharaoh Djoser, built at Saqqara around 2650 BC. The last built for a pharaoh is probably that of Amosis, at Abydos, dating from about 1530 BC The pyramid age, then, was relatively short, lasting a little over 1,100 years.

  None of the other sites, however, reveals such a coherent and integrated plan as does that of Giza. None of the other sites is imbued with such an intense aura of mystery and hidden wisdom. Giza continues to fascinate every visitor, from the dust- and trowel-hardened professional to the amateur whose sense of history may be so askew, whose critical faculties may be so dormant, as to ascribe the buildings to extra-terrestrials. But both share an awe at the achievement.

  It is a notorious fact that little regarding the pyramids at Giza can be established with certainty. They can be measured and that is about all. We still do not even know how they were built. The Great Pyramid in particular poses innumerable unanswered questions. Simply, there are just too many oddities, too many strange constructional flourishes and eccentricities, all of which took immense effort and organization to achieve; yet for what?

  Furthermore, it cannot be proved that Pharaohs Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure were ever buried in their pyramids. They may have been secretly interred elsewhere following the funerary ceremonies in the temples and perhaps in the pyramid. Khufu’s mother, for example, was not laid to rest in her large tomb. Instead, she was secretly buried in an underground vault on the Giza plateau with its 99-foot-deep entrance tunnel completely blocked up. Even the entrance was hidden with a final layer of gravel designed to cover all trace of the shaft. Such a use of secret vaults together with dummy pyramids and tombs was not uncommon; it made the task of robbery or deliberate desecration more difficult.

  Yet, oddly, the Great Pyramid has three tomb chambers: two are empty and apparently unfinished, the third – the King’s Chamber – seems finished but contains an unfinished granite sarcophagus, the top of which is so rough that the saw and chisel marks are still clearly visible. This stands in stark and anomalous contrast to the finely polished walls of the chamber itself. Furthermore, as this sarcophagus is far too large to have been carried up the internal passageways to the chamber, it must have been placed in position during the building of the pyramid, before the King’s Chamber itself was finished.

  This sarcophagus poses a typical problem, one for which there is a very simple question but no obvious answer: why should it be so rough? Was Khufu trying to save money? Was he defrauded by a silken-tongued builder who knew Khufu would be dead before he noticed it?

  The usual explanation is that the initial highly polished coffin was either broken at a very late stage by a flaw in the rock or lost in a shipwreck during its 500-mile journey down the Nile from the quarries at Aswan. Then, in order not to delay the building work, an unfinished coffin was quickly delivered and installed while access to the chamber from above was still possible.

  Anyone who believes this nonsense has no business working in Egyptology: while apparently plausible, the explanation has all the appearance of words being thrown desperately into a gaping breach. Given all that we know of the Egyptians and their perfectionism, it is hardly credible that such a casual approach would be adopted.

  The rough sarcophagus could have easily been finished off by masons continuing their work inside the King’s Chamber during the many years of building which were still to follow. This is very clear. The interior of the King’s Chamber, together with the Grand Gallery leading to it, were both made of the same Aswan granite and were both finished with highly polished surfaces. They must have received their final polishing after the stones had been dragged up the causeway and placed in position. The sarcophagus could easily have received the same attention.

  One explanation which makes more sense than most is that the rough state of the coffin was deliberate, that, in some manner, it was symbolic, was part of the ritual demands which the builders of the pyramid were seeking to fulfil. But no such ritual demand has been found – or, at least, recognized as such.

  On the other hand, despite all the misgivings, the pyramids of Giza may indeed have been tombs. But clearly they were also far more than this. There is little doubt that the pyramids were oriented according to the stars. Without relating to stellar positions such accurate compass alignments would have been impossible. There is also little doubt that the three pyramids were deliberately related to each other in a unified geometric design.1 The only uncertainty is exactly how far from simple geometry and into the realm of secret religious mystery the implications of this can be taken.

  For example: we have seen that if, as authors Bauva
l and Gilbert suggested, a line is drawn linking the centre points of the two large pyramids, then the third and smaller pyramid is offset; the three create a pattern on the ground corresponding to the three stars of Orion’s Belt in the sky.

  Conversely, Egyptologist Dr Mark Lehner, while not disputing that a geometrical arrangement is evident, sees it rather as a function of the surveying methods than as an attempt to mark stellar correlations. He points out that a straight line connects the south-eastern corners of each pyramid. Extending this line to the rocky higher ground further to the south-east, at the point of contact, there is a sizeable stone block let into the rock face.2 During the course of his investigation, Lehner was intrigued to discover that, from the Sphinx temple, at the spring and autumnal equinoxes, sunset occurred along a line drawn through the centre of the temple to the southern base of Khafre’s pyramid. He also discovered that at the summer solstice, when viewed from the same site, the sun set ‘almost exactly midway between the Khufu and Khafre pyramids’. He points out that it thus creates, on an area of several acres, a huge example of the hieroglyphic sign akhet meaning ‘horizon’.3

  Nevertheless, Bauval’s interpretation fits the religious texts in a way that Lehner’s does not. Does this then mean that Bauval is correct? It is impossible to say. In fact, it is not unlikely that both are correct; neither explanation excludes the other. The surveying pattern may have served to orient the stellar alignment on the ground.

  Integration, though, is the keyword for the modern approach to all archaeology, to all attempts to understand the past. The context of artefacts and buildings is the vital clue to their meaning. With his approach, Bauval does seem to be working in the right direction, for evidence is mounting to support the idea of the pyramids forming an integral part of the ritual basis behind the Egyptian understanding of death and the afterlife. A view which is far more complex than simple surveyor’s geometry.

  The geometry of the Giza complex: two approaches.

  In this respect Dr Edwards advanced an intriguing idea about the origins of the ancient Egyptian word for ‘pyramid’ – mer. Could it be, he mused, a compound word made up from the syllable m, which means ‘place’ or ‘instrument’, and the verb r, meaning ‘to ascend’?

  If this is so, then it would suggest that the inner, deeper, secret meaning of a pyramid was ‘place of ascension’ or ‘instrument of ascension’.4 The pyramid would be both the place and the means of raising the pharaoh to the gods. A tool, in other words, to be used by those with the requisite secret knowledge, and the requisite magical spells and rituals. What Dr Edwards did not consider, however, is that this tool might also have been used by the living.

  Secrets of How to Die

  The pyramids at Giza contained no texts at all. Neither did the earlier structures at Saqqara. The first such inscriptions, The Pyramid Texts, are found in the pyramid of the pharaoh Unas, built at Saqqara, at the very end of the 5th Dynasty – around 2350 BC. Subsequently these texts are found in all the pyramids of the following dynasty, carved upon the walls of the inner tombs; they are the oldest Egyptian religious writings known.

  These inscriptions are magical spells aiming to protect the dead king or queen on the journey into the afterlife and to prepare them for what they will find. For that reason they are a fascinating and enigmatic collection of very complex instructions and descriptions. They have been known now for a century or more, but we still cannot say that we understand them for there are words and concepts which still defy translation and deeper levels of understanding which we are only groping towards.

  These texts were certainly not composed by Unas and his priests. They must have existed for a very long time, perhaps even before the pyramid age began. Egyptologists think that parts may have been composed as early as 2700 BC.5

  The suspicion arises, then, that the pyramids were initially devised not so much as monuments to arrogance but as a means by which the journey into the afterlife could be enhanced, protected, and its successful conclusion ensured. This, of course, is also the object of the spells which were later inscribed inside them; these spells were not simply literary conceits; they had a purpose. In the same way, the pyramids were not simply examples of architectural virtuosity; they too had a purpose: the pyramids and the texts were both vital parts of one unified religious process.

  These early Pyramid Texts were eventually developed and modified, giving rise to The Coffin Texts; and, following further development, to the collection of texts entitled The Book of the Coming Forth by Day, generally better known as The Book of the Dead, archaic elements of which reach back, it is thought, to very ancient times.

  All these texts supplied instructions on how to pass easily into the world of the dead, how to be ‘reborn’ into the afterlife. There were spells to ensure that all proceeded successfully together with spells for protection against the many dangers which the dead were expected to confront: they conferred knowledge and protection.

  The divine author of these texts was the moon-god Thoth. Chapter sixty-eight of The Book of the Dead records the recently deceased as ‘having the books of the divine words of the writings of the god Thoth’.6 Thoth was god of writing, of knowledge, of speech and of magic, and the divine guide to the dead. He watched over the judgement of the dead and pronounced and recorded the results. It is not surprising that the burial area of Khemenu (later known as Hermopolis), the centre of the cult of Thoth, has revealed the richest and greatest number of these coffin texts.

  In an important development of this spiritual tradition, late in the second millennium BC, the title of The Book of the Dead began to contain the word sakhu, meaning ‘transfiguration’, revealing that these texts would ‘transform a person into an akh’ – that is, a ‘transfigured spirit that has become one with the light’.7

  Later still, in the fourth century BC, a series of Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts which had been carefully preserved for over 1,000 years in the library of the temple of Osiris at Abydos were produced on papyrus; these were entitled explicitly ‘Transfiguration Texts’: texts to bring the dead to the divine light.8 The deep mysticism which undoubtedly always lay behind the Egyptian texts had finally been revealed – but, of course, only to priests in the temple of Osiris. The wider public had no access to this knowledge, which was regarded as highly esoteric and kept secret.

  It cannot be a coincidence that the later version of Thoth, the great figure of Hermes Trismegistus, would appear with the same aim of helping a transfiguration into the light – but a transfiguration not of the dead, but of the living.

  House of Life

  For a temple, such as that of Osiris, to maintain old texts for 1,000 years would not be uncommon; most cult temples maintained a section called the ‘House of Life’. This was the ancient Egyptian version of the modern university or seminary: here was a library where papyrus scrolls were maintained and a scriptorium where texts were copied and composed. And here too was a school where the arts of reading, writing and ritual were taught together with astronomy, magic, mathematics, law and medicine.9 Perhaps these subjects were arranged in different departments as they would be in the modern world: one inscription mentions ‘the departments of the Houses of Life dealing with medicine’.10 The scribes and priests received all the training in the House of Life that they needed to serve the king, the state or the temple.

  The overwhelming concern of the House of Life was to maintain the magical tradition. An important task was to ensure that the great sacred books of rituals and spells were protected and copied. It was, too, within the House’s precincts that the priests were initiated; priests who, when their training was complete, would conduct the magical rituals in the temples. Opponents were quick to accuse the scribes of the House of Life of sorcery and magic.11

  Naturally, most of what they studied was held to be secret. Some of the magical spells which archaeologists have translated contain statements requiring that, due to their importance, they should never be revealed to anyone beyond the
walls of the House of Life.12

  This institution was of fundamental importance to ancient Egyptian society, for the sacred texts it maintained were the basis of the sacred rituals which lay at the very heart of Egyptian culture. Without this ritualized nurturing, the culture faced disintegration.

  The importance and prestige of the priests of the House of Life was stated succinctly on a Ptolemaic stela now in the Louvre: ‘O all ye priests who penetrate into the words of god and are skilled in writings, ye who are enlightened in the House of Life and have discovered the ways of the gods… ye who carve the tombs and who interpret the mysteries…’13

  The Invasion of Alexander

  In 332 BC the Greek army of Alexander the Great invaded Egypt. It took just a week for him to enter the capital, Memphis, as conqueror. There, it is said, he was crowned. Never again would a native Egyptian rule as pharaoh of Egypt.

  On 20 January 331 BC Alexander founded his city of Alexandria where he was eventually to be buried. For almost 300 years it was to be home for the Greek kings and queens of the Ptolemy family dynasty, the last of whom, the famous Cleopatra, died in 30 BC.

  Alexander the Great had proved invincible. He was the greatest living conqueror the world had known. Yet, after overseeing the beginning of work at his new city, he abruptly did something very curious: with a handful of men he disappeared into the western desert. He sought a remote oasis which held an ancient temple and oracle of the Egyptian god Amon-Ra, to whom he wished to put certain important questions.