Pyramid Quest (14 page)

Of all lost civilizations—real or imagined—none is more famous than Atlantis, which has become an oft-cited, if little proved, source of the Great Pyramid. The copious contemporary literature on Atlantis is often based on Plato, who recounts the tale of a sunken continent in two dialogues written sometime around 360 B.C.: the
Critias,
which is more detailed but was never finished, and the
Timaeus,
which mentions Atlantis only in passing and goes on to discuss the greater issues of the ideal political state and the nature of the universe. Even Plato noted a connection between Atlantis and ancient Egypt. Plato writes that the story he tells was brought to Greece by the great Athenian lawgiver, poet, and traveler Solon (638-559 B.C.), who learned it during his time as a student of the priests of Egypt. The Great Pyramid, however, never figures into Plato’s account.

In a time closer to our own, the American psychic Edgar Cayce (1877- 1945) drew a direct connection between Atlantis and the Great Pyramid. A believer in reincarnation, Cayce worked by entering a trance state and recounting stories purportedly rooted in the past lives of people who came to him for counseling. Of his over 14,000 recorded readings, more than 700 mentioned Atlantis and over 1,100 described ancient Egypt around the time of the building of the Great Pyramid, some of them with great detail and specificity.

According to Cayce, an alliance of peripatetic Atlanteans, native Egyptians, and migrants from the Caucasus built the Great Pyramid somewhere between 10,490 and 10,390 B.C. Raising the stone blocks posed no problem for these superior beings. They used levitation to neutralize gravity and lift the blocks into place. The Great Pyramid was no tomb but a temple with many functions, one of which was the preservation of knowledge at risk of being lost. Knowing that Atlantis was itself soon to be swallowed by the sea, the builders of the Great Pyramid encoded that doomed nation’s wisdom within it.

Other mechanisms besides levitation have been put forward as the advanced, ancient technologies used to build the Great Pyramid: hydrogen balloons, magnets, and aircraft, including planes and helicopters. The helicopter and plane idea comes from images carved into a support beam in the Temple of Seti at Abydos, which indeed do look something like modern-day aircraft. In fact, though, these images result from the recarving of hieroglyphs and do not represent flying machines.

In the second half of the twentieth century, a new twist on the idea of construction by divine power or lost civilization appeared. Even as we first began to probe space, extraterrestrials became the geniuses who built the Great Pyramid and left it behind for the ancient Egyptians to puzzle over and expropriate to their own decadent, latter-day mythology. Three writers have done the most to preach this idea.

Zecharia Sitchin, primarily on the basis of his analyses and translations of ancient texts, argues that the Middle East’s two high ancient civilizations, Sumeria and Egypt, were the product of cultural, even genetic, influence from beyond planet Earth. A race of beings from an undiscovered planet in our own solar system came to earth on an emergency mission, which was later threatened by a mutiny among part of the crew. To save the mission, the leader of the extraterrestrials fashioned the first humans from the available genetic material as a race of workers. This solution worked for a time. Then, in yet another political upheaval, one faction of the extraterrestrials wanted to rid the earth of the new beings—by means of a great flood, no less—while another group wished to preserve the new species by teaching a few of them how to build a boat. The preservationist group befriended the flood’s survivors by passing on to them their own culture and equipping them to inherit the earth the extraterrestrials were now abandoning. Yes, this is another version of the story of Noah, with a sci-fi twist.

Best-selling author Erich von Däniken connects his own notions of visitors from outer space to ancient Egypt and the pyramids. According to von Däniken, the mythology of ancient Egypt recounted the alternating confusion and enlightenment of humans struggling to come to terms with an extraterrestrial reality. For example, the pharaohs had seen beings from outer space fly across the heavens in their spaceships, so they built themselves sun ships to figuratively sail the skies. Going into the realm of the gods at death meant becoming like the extraterrestrials, who had brought the Egyptians the technological marvels of their world. The Egyptians recorded these gifts in images, like the solar barque and the sun disk, that we now call symbols and interpret in religious terms. That, Von Däniken says, is missing the point.

Maverick researcher Richard Hoagland draws a direct connection between the pyramids of ancient Egypt and the putative “pyramids on Mars,” members of a series of peculiar forms photographed on the red planet by the
Viking
probe in 1976. One is the so-called Face on Mars, identified by astronomer Tobias Owen on a photo of an area some 34 by 31 miles, taken at around 40° north latitude on the Martian surface, a region known as Cydonia. Nearby lies the so-called Fort, which has two distinctive straight edges; the City, an arrangement of massive structures interspersed with smaller pyramids; the NK Pyramid, about 25 miles from the Face and on the same latitude as the D & M Pyramid; and the Bowl, which is approached by a long ramp reminiscent of the stairways on Mayan and Aztec pyramids. Most intriguing in terms of studying the Great Pyramid is the D & M Pyramid (called this by Hoagland and others in honor of astronomers Vincent DiPietro and Gregory Molenaar, who have studied the structure in detail on photographs), which is located about 10 miles from the Face and aligned almost perfectly north-south along Mars’s axis, much like the Great Pyramid. The location of all these features in one relatively confined area adds to the enigma. Can it be by chance that so many seemingly artificial shapes are found so close together? Doesn’t this fact alone speak to the presence of a guiding, intelligent hand? Hoagland argues that it does, and that there is a clear and obvious link between the pyramid monuments of Mars and those of ancient Egypt.

The biggest problem with Hoagland’s idea is less the science-fiction nature of the hypothesis than the facts themselves. Apparently yielding to pressure to provide additional data on Cydonia and rising to accusations that the agency had been suppressing information about Martian cities and altering its photographs to cover up the evidence, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration dispatched the
Mars Global Surveyor
to fly over the controversial area and take a new series of photos. These images, snapped in 1998 at 10 times the resolution of the original
Viking
photographs and under different conditions of light and shadow, stripped away much of the Cydonia mystery. Now the Face looked less like a face than a weathered landform.

The more I have looked at the images, the more I am convinced that they are quite interesting but entirely natural features. Arguing that they are artificial is a very long stretch, one simply not supported by the evidence to date. On the basis of what we now know, the Cydonia “pyramids” are natural features formed by geological processes under Martian conditions, which differ from those on earth and produce shapes of an appearance other than what we are used to.

All these writers, from Taylor to Hoagland, underscore yet again how the Great Pyramid becomes a Rorschach test from antiquity. Taylor and Smyth, for example, faced an assault on traditional Christianity prompted by the scientific revolution of the nineteenth century. In response to Darwin’s book
On the Origin of Species
intimating—but never saying—that humans were but another animal species lacking any special blessing from on high, they sought rock-solid assurance that God would triumph over the naturalist who collected finches on the Galápagos. Sitchin, von Däniken, and Hoagland come from a time when traditional religion has given way to fundamentalism and only science offers intellectual credibility. They cloak their work in supposedly scientific jargon yet seek from extraterrestrial life the same sort of cosmic transcendence Taylor and Smyth wanted from their very Protestant and completely Anglo-Saxon divinity.

One key unstated assumption informs the work of all these authors: the people of Old Kingdom Egypt were incapable of building the Great Pyramid on their own. So we now turn to the question: Could they have done it all by themselves?

The sole ancient description of possible building techniques used to erect the Great Pyramid comes from the Greek historian Herodotus. The father of history asked around about the construction of the immense monument, when he traveled to Egypt a century before Alexander the Great arrived with his Macedonian military machine and a conqueror’s glint in his eyes.

Here is what Herodotus had to say, according to one translation:

Herodotus made no secret that he worked from hearsay. He went looking for stories, collected them as they were told to him, and often leaned to the one that seemed the most likely or the most interesting to him. This heritage is obvious in his account of the pyramid’s building. For example, he is unsure whether the wooden machines were left on each level of the pyramid or moved from one to another. He was told two stories, and he repeats them both, not being engineer enough to choose between them.

All historians, no matter how conscientious, implicitly reflect the concerns of their times. As the father of history, Herodotus began the trend. He created the image of the pyramids built by a 100,000-man army of seasonal workers, often said to be pressed into labor and thus effectively slaves, who spent three months of each year—presumably the time when the Nile was in flood and the fields unworkable. Josephus, the Jewish historian of the first century A.D., reinforced this image by suggesting that his ancestors in Egypt had been forced to build various structures, including pyramids. It is an image that has persisted to our day. A fabulous Hollywood example is Cecil B. Demille’s
Ten Commandments,
which shows a scene of pyramid building in which sweating, rag-clad, sunburned slaves toil in dark crowds as numerous as ants scuttling across an immense, sand-colored colony. This image doesn’t fit, however, with what we know of the Old Kingdom.

As far as we know, there were no hordes of ill-fed slaves in the Egypt of the Fourth Dynasty. Poor people did exist, but they weren’t slaves. The poor were Egyptian citizens, and they enjoyed the same rights as all citizens, including the right to turn to the king to redress grievances.
⁸
People who can ask the pharaoh for help are not slaves. In telling stories of slavery, Herodotus and later writers were reflecting the concerns of their own time, not the reality of ancient Egypt. The Greeks had fought mightily for centuries to protect themselves against enslavement by Persia. Josephus was writing at a time when the Jewish nation was struggling, and even actively waging rebellion, against the Roman Empire. Josephus himself was a complex character, at various times governor of Galilee, leader of a band of resistance fighters during the Jewish uprising of 66 A.D., and later a recipient of the patronage of the Roman emperor Vespasian (ruled 69-79 A.D.). Such writers were more than prepared to find yet another example of despotism in Khufu.

In addition, slavery was hardly a sensible strategy for building the Great Pyramid. The precision of the building and the efficiency needed to erect it swiftly are not the attributes of underfed, ill-treated slaves. Raising this immense monument took the skills of highly accomplished craftsmen, who, the evidence indicates, worked in gangs or crews and moved from site to site as their abilities were needed. Part of the pyramid labor force was organized in the same manner as boat crews. The team, or crew, consisted of about 200 men organized into five groups that were further subdivided into gangs. Each of the groups had a name, which sometimes referred to the men’s place of origin and sometimes to such required virtues as stamina, strength, and endurance. Another system was also used in construction; it divided an unknown number of men into gangs named after three of the four cardinal directions. There is no evidence of any eastern teams, perhaps because “east,” like “left” and “13” in our culture, carried connotations of bad luck, or because “east” was too sacred to be used for such mundane purposes. These organized groups spent their lives at the work of building and became masters at what they did.

Excavation of the workers’ cemetery at Giza by Zahi Hawass has uncovered skeletons with joints worn by years of hard work. One of the skeletons came from a man who had suffered several fractures, all of which had healed well and straight. Evidently, the pyramid workers received medical care that was as good as it could be for that time in history.