From Atlantis to the Sphinx (12 page)

The first scientific theory of the purpose of the Great Pyramid was put forward by a London publisher named John Taylor in 1864. He wondered why the builders of the Pyramid had chosen to make it slope at an angle of
almost
52°—51° 51'. When he compared the height of the Pyramid with the length of its base he saw the only possible answer: it
had
to slope at that exact angle if the relation of its height to the length of its base should be exactly the relation of the radius of a circle to its circumference. In other words, the builders were revealing a knowledge of what the Greeks would later call π (pi). Why should they want to encode π in the Pyramid? Could it possibly be that they were really speaking about the earth itself, so the Pyramid was supposed to represent the hemisphere from the North Pole to the equator? In fact, towards the end of the second century BC, the Greek grammarian Agatharchides of Cnidus, the tutor of the pharaoh’s children, was told that the base of the Great Pyramid was precisely one eighth of a minute of a degree in length—that is, it was an eighth of a minute of a degree of the earth’s circumference. (A minute is a sixtieth of a degree.) In fact, if the length of the Pyramid’s base is multiplied by eight, then sixty, then 360, the result is just under 25,000 miles, a remarkable approximation of the circumference of the earth.

Taylor concluded that, being unable to build a huge dome, the Egyptians had done the next best thing and incorporated the earth’s measurements into a pyramid.

So it
was
possible—indeed, highly likely—that the ancient Egyptians possessed knowledge that was thousands of years ahead of their time.

Unfortunately, this was Taylor’s sticking point. Rather than give the ancient Egyptians credit for knowing far more than anyone thought, he concluded that the only way these ignoramuses could have known such things was from Divine Revelation—God had directly inspired them. That was too much even for the Victorians, and his work was received with derision.

When the Scottish Astronomer Royal, Charles Piazzi Smyth—who was also a friend of Taylor’s—visited the Pyramid in 1865 and made his own measurements, he concluded that Taylor was fundamentally correct about π. But being, like Taylor, a Christian zealot, he was also unable to resist the temptation to drag in Jehovah and the Bible. Not long before, a religious crank named Robert Menzies had advanced the theory that the Great Pyramid contained detailed prophecies of world history in its measurements. Piazzi Smyth swallowed this whole, and concluded that the Pyramid revealed that the earth was created in 4004 BC, and that it contains all the major dates in earth history, such as the Flood in 2400 BC. He also came up with a staggeringly simple explanation of why the Grand Gallery is so different from the narrow ascending passage that leads to it: its beginning symbolises the birth of Christ. The Second Coming, he concluded, will happen in 1911. All this was again received by his scientific contemporaries with scepticism, although his book had considerable popular success.

Later, the founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Charles Taze Russell, would embrace the prophecy theory of the Great Pyramid, and a group called the British Israelites, who believed that the British are the ten lost tribes of Israel, elaborated it even further.
³

More sober theories of the Pyramid’s purpose included the suggestion that it was intended as a landmark for Egyptian land surveyors, and that it was a giant sundial. This latter led to the most interesting and plausible theory so far: that it was intended as an astronomical observatory. This had been stated as fact by the fifth-century Byzantine philosopher Proclus, who mentioned that the Pyramid was used as an observatory while it was under construction. In 1883 it was again advanced by an astronomer, Richard Anthony Proctor.

Proctor realised that one of the prime necessities for an agricultural civilisation is an accurate calendar, which involves precise observation of the moon and stars. What they would need, to begin with, is a long narrow slot pointing due north (or south), through which the passage of stars and planets could be observed and noted down in star tables.

The first necessity, said Proctor, was to determine true north, then align a tube on it. Nowadays we point a telescope at the Pole star; but in ancient Egypt, this was not in the same place, due to a phenomenon called ‘procession of the equinoxes’ (a term to note, since it will play a major part in later arguments). Imagine a pencil stuck through the earth from the North to the South Pole; this is its axis. But due to the gravity of the sun and moon, this axis has a slight wobble, and its ends describe small circles in the heavens, causing the north end of the pencil to point at different stars. In ancient Egypt, the Pole star was Alpha Draconis.

Now the stars appear to describe a semicircle above our heads, from horizon to horizon. Those directly overhead (at the meridian) describe the longest circle, those nearest the Pole the smallest. If the ancient Egyptians had wanted to point a telescope at Alpha Draconis, they would have had to point it at an angle of 26° 17'—which, Proctor noted, happens to be precisely the angle of the descending passage.

He also noted that if the ‘vermin-infested pit’ underneath the Pyramid had been filled with water, the light of the then Pole star, Alpha Draconis, would shine down it on to the ‘pool’, as into the mirror of a modern astronomer’s telescope. The flat top of the Great Pyramid was, according to Proctor, an observatory platform.

Proctor’s theory had the advantage of suggesting the purpose of the Grand Gallery, and the peculiar oblong holes in its ‘ramp’. If, said Proctor, an ancient astronomer wanted an ideal ‘telescope’ to study the heavens, he would probably ask an architect to devise a building with an enormous slot in one of its walls, through which he could study the transit of the stars. Proctor thought that the top end of the Grand Gallery was originally such a slot. Astronomers stationed on scaffolding above the Grand Gallery—with the scaffolding based in the oblong holes—would be able to observe the transits of stars with great accuracy. The bricks in the apex of the Grand Gallery are removable, and this would also enable them to study the stars overhead.

The obvious objection is that the Grand Gallery at present ends halfway across the Pyramid, and that the King’s Chamber with its ‘secret chambers’ lies beyond it. The present King’s Chamber would have completely blocked the ‘slot’. But is it not conceivable, said Proctor, that the Pyramid remained in its half-finished state for a long time before it was finished? In fact, once the heavens had been minutely mapped, the unfinished pyramid would have served its purpose, and could be completed. Proctor envisaged that it would take about ten years before the builders were ready to move beyond the Grand Gallery, and by that time the priests would have completed their work of making star maps and calendars.

In retrospect, it seems clear that Proctor had come the closest so far to suggesting a reasonable theory of the Great Pyramid. Since
The Great Pyramid, Observatory, Tomb and Temple
, we have become increasingly aware of the astronomical alignments of great monuments like the Egyptian temples and Stonehenge. In fact, it was only ten years after Proctor's book, in 1893, that the British astronomer Norman Lockyer (later Sir Norman), who identified helium in the sun, went on to demonstrate precisely how Egyptian temples could have been used. On holiday in Greece, the young Lockyer found himself wondering if the Parthenon was aligned astronomically—recalling, as he said later, that the east windows of many English churches face the sunrise on the day of their patron saint. Since Egyptian temples had been measured and documented so carefully, he turned to them to seek evidence for his thesis. He was able to show that temples were astronomically aligned, so that the light of a star or other heavenly body would penetrate their depths as it might have penetrated a telescope. He noted, for example, how the light of the sun at the summer solstice entered the temple of Amen-Ra at Karnak and penetrated along its axis to the sanctuary. Lockyer was also the first to suggest that Stonehenge had been constructed as a sort of observatory—a view now generally accepted.

The significance of Lockyer’s method was that it enabled him to date Stonehenge to 1680 BC, and the Karnak temple—or at least its original plan—to about 3700 BC. He noted that sun temples were designed to catch the sun at the solstice (when the sun is furthest from the equator) or the equinox (when the sun is above it), and star temples to catch the star’s heliacal rising (just before dawn), again at a solstice. But he also noted that a sun temple could serve as a ‘calendar’ for much longer than a star temple. This is because a star temple is subject to the precession of the equinoxes already mentioned. Although it amounts to a tiny fraction—1/72 of a degree per annum (causing the stars to rise twenty minutes later each year) it obviously adds up over the centuries, coming a full circle every 25,920 years. The result was that star temples had to be realigned every century or so—Lockyer pointed out evidence that the Luxor temple had been realigned four times, explaining its curious and irregular shape, to which Schwaller de Lubicz was to devote so many years of study.

According to Lockyer, the earliest Egyptian temples, at Heliopolis and Annu, were oriented to northern stars at the summer solstice, while the Giza pyramids were built by ‘a new invading race’ who were far more astronomically sophisticated, and used both northern and eastern stars.

But why should the Egyptians take such a deep interest in the heavens? One reason, as we have already observed, is that farmers need a calendar—in 3200 BC, the ‘dog star’ Sirius became the most important star in the heavens because it rose at dawn at the beginning of the Egyptian New Year, when the Nile began to rise. But for the Egyptians, the stars were not merely seasonal indicators. They were also the home of the gods who presided over life and death.

And it was this recognition that would form the basis of one of the most interesting insights into the Great Pyramid since the days of Proctor.

In 1979, a Belgian construction engineer named Robert Bauval was on his way to Egypt, and bought at London’s Heathrow Airport a book called
The Sirius Mystery
by Robert Temple.

The book had caused some sceptical reviewers to classify Temple with Erich von Daniken; but this is hardly fair. Temple’s starting point was a genuine scientific mystery: that an African tribe called the Dogon (in Mali) have known for a long time that the dog star Sirius is actually a double star, with an ‘invisible’ companion. Astronomers had suspected this companion, Sirius B, since the 1830s, when Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel noted the perturbations in the orbit of Sirius, and reasoned that there must be an incredibly dense but invisible star—what we now call a white dwarf, in which atoms have collapsed in on themselves, so that a piece the size of a pinhead weighs many tons. According to the Dogon, their knowledge of Sirius B—which they called the Digitaria star—was brought to them by fishlike creatures called the Nommo, who came from Sirius thousands of years ago. It was not until 1928, when Sir Arthur Addington postulated the existence of ‘white dwarfs’, that knowledge of Sirius B ceased to be the province of a few astronomers. It seems inconceivable that some European traveller could have brought such knowledge to the Dogon long before that. In any case, the Dogon possessed cult masks relating to Sirius, stored in caves, some of them centuries old.

As Temple discovered when he went to Paris to study with anthropologist Germaine Dieterlen—who, with Marcel Griaule, had spent years among the Dogon—the Dogon seemed to have a surprisingly detailed knowledge of the solar system. They knew the planets revolved around the sun, that the moon was ‘dry and dead’, and that Saturn had rings and Jupiter had moons. Dieterlen noted that the Babylonians also believed that their civilisation was founded by fish gods.

Since the dog star (so called because it is in the constellation Canis Major) was the sacred star of the Egyptians after 3200 BC (called Sothis and identified with the goddess Isis), Temple speculated that the Dogon gained their knowledge from the Egyptians, and that the fact that the goddess Isis is so often to be found in boat paintings with two fellow goddesses, Anukis and Satis, could indicate that the ancient Egyptians also knew that Sirius is actually a treble system, consisting of Sirius, Sirius B, and the home of the Nommo.

But, surely, such knowledge would be contained in hieroglyphic inscriptions from ancient Egypt? Temple disagreed, pointing out that Griaule had had to be initiated into the religious secrets of the Dogon after ritual preparation. If the Egyptians knew about Sirius B, such knowledge would be reserved for initiates.

‘Ancient astronaut’ enthusiasts would suggest—and have suggested—that this ‘proves’ that the ancient Egyptian civilisation was also founded by ‘gods from space’, but Temple is far more cautious, merely remarking on the mystery of a primitive African tribe having such a sophisticated knowledge of astronomy.

Reading Temple’s book reawakened Bauval’s interest in astronomy, and he pursued it during his time in the Sudan, and subsequently in Saudi Arabia. Back in Egypt, in his home town Alexandria, in 1982, he drove at dawn to Giza, where he was startled to see a desert jackal near the third pyramid, that of Menkaura (or Mycerinos). These animals are seldom seen, and this reminded him of the curious story of how one of the most amazing discoveries in Egyptology came about. In 1879, the head of a gang of workmen at Saqqara had noticed a jackal near the pyramid of Unas, last pharaoh of the 5th Dynasty (
c.
2300 BC), and when the jackal vanished into a low passage of the pyramid, the workman followed, probably hoping to find treasure. His light showed him that he was in a chamber whose walls and ceiling were covered with beautiful hieroglyphics. This was astonishing, as the pyramids of the Giza complex were devoid of inscriptions.

These became known as the Pyramid Texts and—like the later Book of the Dead—contained rituals concerning the king’s journey to the afterlife. Five pyramids proved to contain such texts. They are probably the oldest religious writings in the world.