Pyramid Quest (13 page)

Colin Reader, a geological engineer educated at London University, comes to a similar conclusion in a 2001 issue of the journal
Archaeometry,
following a meticulous study of Giza’s weathering patterns and the hydrol ogy of the plateau. He also adds a significant piece of physical evidence. Agreeing with my analysis of the weathering patterns, Reader notes correctly that the enclosure is most heavily weathered and precipitation-eroded at its far western end, in the area behind (that is, west of) the lower wall, which was presumably carved when Khafre fully excavated the rump of the Sphinx and repaired the statue. The explanation for this particularly severe weathering and erosion is surface runoff from rain storms. Since the Giza plateau tilts down from the north and west, runoff headed directly toward and through the Sphinx enclosure on its way to the Nile Valley—or at least it did so until the reign of Khufu. This pharaoh removed large quantities of stone from quarry pits immediately upslope from the Sphinx enclosure. After the pits were abandoned, wind-blown sand filled them and soaked up any runoff heading down toward the Sphinx enclosure. Therefore, the heavy weathering and degradation of the western end of the Sphinx enclosure had to occur before the quarries were excavated during Khufu’s reign.

Reader also argues that the Sphinx is hardly the only Giza monument that predates Khufu. According to his analysis, Khafre’s Causeway (which runs from the Sphinx area up to the Mortuary Temple on the eastern side of Khafre’s pyramid), a portion of the Mortuary Temple itself, and the Sphinx Temple all predate Khafre, who is thought by conventional Egyptology to have been responsible for them. Interestingly, John Anthony West and I too had earlier come to the conclusion that part of the Mortuary Temple is older than Khafre, on the basis of what appear to be two stages of construction in the temple: to an early, now heavily weathered, core of gigantic megalithic blocks, stylistically Old Kingdom masonry has been added. Reader has arrived at the same conclusion on his own, using similar evidence. For his part, Reader is unwilling to push the date of the Sphinx back beyond the latter half of the Early Dynastic Period, or circa 2800-2600 B.C., and there he goes wrong. If the Sphinx was carved in the 2800-2600 B.C. period, then there had to be sufficient heavy rainfall during that time to heavily weather the monument and its enclosure. The height of the rainy period had ended by 3000 B.C., however, and Egypt was well on its way to becoming desert by 2800 B.C. Mud-brick mastabas built on the Saqqara Plateau, only 10 miles up the Nile from Giza, and dated indisputably to circa 2800 B.C., show little rain weathering, even though they are built from a much softer and more vulnerable material. It is impossible that the Sphinx could have been carved as late as 2800 to 2600 B.C. and weathered so badly, under scant rainfall, that it required extensive repair by the time Khufu was building his pyramid circa 2550 B.C.

Still, despite the disagreement over the era of construction, Reader, like Coxill, corroborates the fundamental truth about the Sphinx: the monument belongs to a time much older than Khafre or Khufu.

One of the most intriguing predynastic sites in Egypt—and one that indirectly corroborates my dating for the Great Sphinx—lies far from Giza, in a now-desolate place called Nabta Playa, about 65 miles west of Abu Simbel, in southernmost Egypt’s Western Desert. The playa is a basin that filled with water when rainfall was sufficient. Beginning in about 9000 B.C., cattle herders brought their animals to the playa during the wet season and grazed them until water and grass dried up. By 7000 B.C. the nomads had settled in the area, dug deep wells to allow year-round habitation, and built villages of small huts arranged in straight lines. Following a major drought, the villagers abandoned the playa; they were replaced circa 5500 B.C. by people with a social system more complex than any yet seen in Egypt. Their religion centered on sacrificing young cows and interring them in roofed chambers marked by burial mounds. Nabta grew into a ceremonial center that drew people from all over the Western Desert to participate in rituals that probably confirmed social and religious unity. At some point, the people of Nabta turned to erecting large stones in alignments, building a calendar circle of megalithic stones to mark the summer solstice—the earliest astronomical measuring device known in Egypt—and constructing over 30 complex structures.

According to an analysis by Thomas G. Brophy in his book
The Origin Map,
three of the stones inside the Nabta calendar circle represent the belt of Orion. They show how these three stars would have appeared on summer solstice nights between 6400 B.C. and 4900 B.C. as they crossed the meridian—the imaginary line in the sky that runs from north to south through the zenith. Someone standing at the north end of the calendar circle on the meridian line of sight would see the stars of Orion’s Belt represented by the stones just as they would look when he or she looked upward to gaze at the real meridian halving the nighttime sky.

I find Brophy’s analysis convincing. And it is intriguing that his range of dates corresponds to the same period when my research indicates that the Sphinx was under construction. That same individual who saw the map of Orion’s Belt in the stones of Nabta could have made the journey down the Nile to see the Sphinx emerging from the limestone bedrock of the Giza Plateau. And, as we shall see in chapter 6, the link between Giza, Nabta, and Orion is both fascinating and very much to the point of understanding the mystery and purpose of the Great Pyramid.

It is clear that three pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty—Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure—had an important hand in shaping the Giza Plateau that we see today. And it is equally clear that when Khufu turned to Giza to memorialize his rule, he wasn’t initiating a new religious site. He was instead returning to a sacred place that was already very, very old.

NAMING THE BUILDER

CONSIDERING THE GREAT PYRAMID SIMPLY AS AN EXERCISE in engineering, it is easy to see how it qualified as one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. For one thing, there is the sheer mass of the structure—about 2.6 million cubic meters (approximately 90 million cubic feet), enough to enclose Saint Peter’s in the Vatican and Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London with plenty of room left over. Although it is impossible to pluck the Great Pyramid up and set it on a scale, the weight of the monument has been estimated at around 6 million tons. Its footprint extends over more than 13 acres, and it contains upward of 2 million blocks of stone, a few of them weighing in the neighborhood of 50 or more tons.

Yet the wonder of the Great Pyramid extends to more than size. The structure’s precision is striking and practically unparalleled. Despite its immense size, the Great Pyramid is as close to perfectly square as any building that has ever been made. Its orientation is also extraordinarily close to perfect. Each side faces one of the cardinal directions: north, south, east, and west. Modern builders would have trouble hitting the directions so well.

How, one wonders, did the Egyptians accomplish all this, those many millennia ago? The answer, some writers say, is simple: the Egyptians had nothing to do with it.

In his book
The Great Pyramid: Man’s Monument to Man ,
ancient mysteries researcher Tom Valentine summarizes well this dissenting point of view: “If one takes the time and effort to really study the Great Pyramid at Giza, the first conclusion must be that no people whose culture was only one step removed from the Stone Age could have possibly designed and built such a monument.”
¹

Ancient people as we know them were not up to the task, Valentine argues. Given the Great Pyramid’s extraordinary size and perfect complexity, someone other than the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom or the Predynastic Period must have been responsible.

Historically, the first candidate for true builder was God. The earliest modern writer to advance this idea was John Taylor (1781-1864), whose day job was editing the
London Observer.
Taylor was also a publisher; the great English poet John Keats numbered among the writers he brought to the reading public. Taylor was already in his late fifties when Vyse returned to England and created something of a stir. Taylor devoted much of his remaining life to studying the Great Pyramid—without ever actually going to Egypt and looking at the monument firsthand. His ideas appeared
The Great Pyramid. Why Was It Built? & Who Built It?
first published in 1860 (although dated 1859 on the title page).

As we shall explore in more depth in chapter 8, Taylor was one of those who saw in the Great Pyramid’s measurements—height, perimeter, area, angle of slope, and so forth—an elaborate code carrying a universal, even infinite message. He wrote that the pyramid was built to
“make a record of the measure of the Earth”
and that the monument’s builders knew our planet’s circumference, expressed in units derived from the accurate spherical dimensions of the earth.
²

This assertion left Taylor in something of a theological quandary, however. He was a profoundly religious Protestant, a fundamentalist who believed in the literal factuality and truth of the Bible. As Taylor saw it, God created Adam and Eve circa 4000 B.C. and loosed Noah’s flood upon the earth circa 2300 B.C. Since the historians of Taylor’s day dated the Great Pyramid to about 2000 B.C., that left only 300 years for humankind to have arisen from the watery erasure of the deluge to a complete, accurate knowledge of the planet’s spherical dimensions. To make matters worse, the ancient Egyptians were pagan unbelievers. It was too much to believe that so unholy a people could have made such a major scientific advance so quickly.

Taylor was convinced they hadn’t. Rather, he wrote, “it is probable that to some human beings in the earliest ages of society, a degree of intellectual power was given by the Creator, which raised them far above the level of those succeeding inhabitants of the earth.”
³
He indicated, too, that these God-guided builders were not the pagan Egyptians who later enslaved the Hebrews. Instead, the Great Pyramid was built by men from “the
chosen race
in the line of, though preceding, Abraham; so early indeed as to be closer to Noah than to Abraham.”
⁴

Although Taylor’s ideas proved unpopular in England, they inspired Charles Piazzi Smyth, another true Christian believer, who was the astronomer royal of Scotland, at the Edinburgh observatory. Smyth took Taylor’s fascination with the Great Pyramid’s numbers to a high art and devoted four months and most of his life savings to measuring and photographing the monument. As we will explore in more detail in chapter 8, Smyth discovered his own personal validation of the Bible’s timelines in the lengths, angles, and marks of the Great Pyramid and furthered the message of John Taylor. In its way, as Smyth saw it, the Great Pyramid exceeded scripture in the importance of its revelation.

“In the Great Pyramid,” Smyth wrote in the 1880 edition of
Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid,
“the world now possesses a
Monument
of Inspiration, as it has long possessed a
Book
of Inspiration, one dating altogether, and the other partly, from primeval times.”
⁵
The Great Pyramid was not a pagan monument. No Egyptian designed the Great Pyramid or lifted uninspired its limestones and granites into place: “the Great Pyramid was yet prophetically intended—by inspiration afforded to the architect from the one and only living God.”
⁶

Despite his excellent scientific credentials, Smyth fared no better with his ideas than John Taylor had. Today, only a few religious zealots, prophets, and extreme visionaries would hold to a theory of divine inspiration underlying the Great Pyramid. Yet Taylor’s and Smyth’s notions have survived, dressed up in the clothing of contemporary culture.

In his 1975 book
The Great Pyramid,
Tom Valentine, who, like Taylor and Smyth, rejects the idea that the Old Kingdom Egyptians could have built the Great Pyramid on their own, argues that the monument is actually the work of an unknown, very high civilization called the Hyksos, a Greek word sometimes mistranslated as “shepherd kings.” The Hyksos are known historically, although not in the form Valentine gives them. They were a group of Canaanites or Syrians, most likely displaced by wars in their homeland, who settled in Egypt and later took control of Memphis, the capital, in the middle seventeenth century B.C. and founded the Fifteenth Dynasty during the Second Intermediate Period (c. 1640-1532 B.C.). Valentine sees them as much more than outside invaders who exploited chaos to establish political control over Lower Egypt for a significant time. To him, they were an enlightened people who had survived the deluge recounted in the biblical story of Noah. The Hyksos brought goodwill, harmony, and prosperity wherever they visited. Their wisdom was bestowed most abundantly on the Egyptians, who built the Great Pyramid under their guidance as a temple of human potential. Their work done, the Hyksos faded away, confident that a later civilization in search of enlightenment—one like our own, for example—would solve the mystery of the Great Pyramid and embrace its encoded message.