Pyramid Quest (32 page)
Authors: Robert M. Schoch
Tags: #History, #Ancient Civilizations, #Egypt, #World, #Religious, #New Age; Mythology & Occult, #Literature & Fiction, #Mythology & Folk Tales, #Fairy Tales, #Religion & Spirituality, #Occult, #Spirituality
Sometime later, perhaps in the Middle Kingdom, maybe in the New Kingdom, the Great Pyramid was reopened. The granite plugs remained in place—removing them was probably beyond the technology of the time— but the Well provided a way to climb up from the Descending Passage into the Ascending, and from there into the Grand Gallery and King’s Chamber. It may be that the Well was dug in the Old Kingdom period as an escape route for the workers who put the granite plugs in place and then was reopened later. Or it may be that the Well was excavated during the Middle or New Kingdom in order to enter the upper pyramid. We simply don’t know which scenario holds true.
With access to the upper interior spaces of the Great Pyramid restored, the building could have been used as a site for ritual training and initiations. It may well have become what Saint Peter’s is for Catholics, the Kaaba for Muslims, and Sedona for New Age seekers. During this period, from about 1500 to 500 B.C., the
Book of the Dead
was reworked again and again, in essence being retooled as a liturgy for use in the Great Pyramid—accordingly, as time passed, the book came to resemble more and more the interior of the Great Pyramid itself. Importantly, the final version of the
Book of the Dead
dates to the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, a time of economic prosperity that is also known as the Saite Period, for its devotion to Isis at the temple of Sais (recall Schiller’s poem “The Veiled Image at Sais,” discussed in chapter 11). At this time, too, the cult of Khufu again grew prominent. I doubt that this resurgence is a simple coincidence. Rather, the Great Pyramid figured importantly into the stages of Egyptian religious life.
Book of the Dead
was reworked again and again, in essence being retooled as a liturgy for use in the Great Pyramid—accordingly, as time passed, the book came to resemble more and more the interior of the Great Pyramid itself. Importantly, the final version of the
Book of the Dead
dates to the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, a time of economic prosperity that is also known as the Saite Period, for its devotion to Isis at the temple of Sais (recall Schiller’s poem “The Veiled Image at Sais,” discussed in chapter 11). At this time, too, the cult of Khufu again grew prominent. I doubt that this resurgence is a simple coincidence. Rather, the Great Pyramid figured importantly into the stages of Egyptian religious life.
Apparently, though, this period ended by the time Herodotus journeyed to Egypt, about a century in advance of Alexander the Great’s army of Macedonian conquest. In the time between the Twenty-sixth Dynasty and Herodotus’s arrival, the Persians conquered Egypt and turned it into a province of their empire. While folktales continued to pass on the surprisingly accurate scraps of the Great Pyramid’s history that Herodotus recorded, his account provides no evidence that the Persian-ruled Egyptians of the time were still using the structure in the same ritual manner as their predecessors. The status of the Great Pyramid had shifted from ancient shrine to abandoned ruin in an occupied country.
And there it remained, through Macedonian, Roman, Christian, and Muslim invasion, until A.D. 820. In that year the ruler of Egypt, Abdullah al Mamun, organized a work party to tunnel into the Great Pyramid, promising the men a share of the treasure they were sure to discover inside. Although the
Arabian Nights
ascribed magical qualities and heaps of gold to the Great Pyramid, al Mamun may have been more interested in the rumor that the ancient building included a secret room containing charts of the earth and sky. Al Mamun was a scholar and a sponsor of scholars, who paid 70 learned men to create an image of the earth and Islam’s first astronomical chart. Whether al Mamun’s motivation was for riches or intellect, his tunnel opened yet another stage in the Great Pyramid’s history, the one that leads, through the medieval, Renaissance, and modern periods, to this very day.
Arabian Nights
ascribed magical qualities and heaps of gold to the Great Pyramid, al Mamun may have been more interested in the rumor that the ancient building included a secret room containing charts of the earth and sky. Al Mamun was a scholar and a sponsor of scholars, who paid 70 learned men to create an image of the earth and Islam’s first astronomical chart. Whether al Mamun’s motivation was for riches or intellect, his tunnel opened yet another stage in the Great Pyramid’s history, the one that leads, through the medieval, Renaissance, and modern periods, to this very day.
When I step back from the Great Pyramid and put the stages and phases of its history into context, three key lessons appear to emerge.
• The first is the structure’s remarkable antiquity. Ritual use of the oldest portion of the structure, the original natural mound rising up from the Giza Plateau, dates to at least 7000 to 5000 B.C., between 2,500 and 4,500 years before Khufu’s workers levered the last facing stone into place. The origins of the Great Pyramid may be even older. Recall that astronomical alignments at Giza and Nabta Playa point as far back as circa 11,000 B.C. and 16,500 B.C., respectively. The Old Kingdom Egyptians didn’t simply rise up full-blown from the desert as a mysteriously civilized people. Rather, they were the flower of a root that reached back 10 millennia or more into prehistory and that challenges our notions of civilization’s beginnings.
• These people knew a great deal, which is the second lesson I draw from the Great Pyramid. By the time of Khufu, they had been watching and memorizing the skies for between eight and fourteen millennia. They understood the workings of the cosmos so well that they could align large structures with solstices, equinoxes, and the rising and setting points of stars and constellations. Using the north celestial pole as their reference, they oriented the Great Pyramid to the cardinal directions with an accuracy that makes modern-day civil engineers shake their heads in wonder. They understood geometry so well that they could build pi and phi into the Great Pyramid. The size and shape of the earth were known to them, down to the size of a degree of latitude at the equator and the flattening of the planet at the poles. They knew so much that I wonder how much we have missed about their knowledge.
• The third lesson arises from the Great Pyramid’s longevity and continuing mystery: throughout its long history, this structure has meant different things to different people. The ancient Egyptians, I am sure, were creating a scared space in Eliade’s terms. The original mound, the first base, the astronomical observatory, and the finished pyramid itself all served to replicate the cosmos, to restate the mystery of existence within a universe we only dimly understand. Egyptians of the Middle Kingdom, New Kingdom, and Late Period Egyptians, who used the Great Pyramid for ritual and initiation, likewise understood its space as sacred. They created a somewhat different universe within it, one that existed less in a timeless, stony statement of knowledge than in the heart-opening power of ritual. In the Christian and Muslim eras, the Great Pyramid existed primarily as a reminder of the idolatry true religion sought to suppress. In our own time, the Great Pyramid has become a point of evidence in any number of arguments and theories—whether it is conventional Egyptology’s unflattering view of the ancient Egyptians as talented but ignorant engineers, Sitchin’s imaginations of extraterrestrial intervention, or Menzies’s Bible-derived time line of salvation. Determined that the Great Pyramid must be what we are sure it is, we fail at the most challenging task of all: seeing the ancient Egyptians on their own terms.
René Schwaller de Lubicz attempted to do just that, and he becomes the figure who brings this book full circle. It was Schwaller de Lubicz’s observation that only water could have caused the peculiar weathering pattern on the Great Sphinx of Giza that brought me to Egypt for the first time. The longer I study this place, the more I am convinced that Schwaller de Lubicz offers an important insight into the ancient Egyptians. He understood something about the ancient Egyptians that deserves our attention.
His studies of the temple of Luxor made Schwaller well aware of the ancient Egyptians’ intellectual sophistication. And he recognized that the new physics pioneered by Albert Einstein and Max Planck had overturned the clocklike mechanical universe of the nineteenth century. As Schwaller saw it, this new cosmology was leading us toward an understanding of the world more in line with the thinking of the ancients. The Egyptians, Schwaller believed, saw the world symbolically. They understood nature as an open book that revealed the metaphysical forces behind creation. This was a vision we need to regain, he believed.
But we cannot get there simply by using our heads. A consciousness based only on cognition—the data of scientific research, for example—divides the world into ever smaller pieces in its struggle to understand and control outer events. In its place, Schwaller argued for what he called functional consciousness: an awareness that comes from within, and one that, instead of dividing the world into pieces, seeks out the unity underlying its sometimes disparate appearance. For example, phi wasn’t simply a handy mathematical constant to the ancient Egyptians. It was a key to reality’s blueprint, a cosmic law that gave shape to the world and filled those who understood it with awe.
I feel that same awe whenever I lift my head from this writing to look again at the Great Pyramid. I feel awe that the ancients could build so remarkable a structure, that my own human ancestry includes not only a building of such beauty but also all the insights, observations, and spiritual experiences it has witnessed and incorporated. In a time of environmental degradation, extinction of species, terrorist warfare, and ethnic cleansing, we need to be reminded of both the magnificence of our heritage and our place in an interconnected universe. The Great Pyramid says all that, and more.
APPENDICES
by Robert M. Schoch
INTRODUCTION TO THE APPENDICESby Robert M. Schoch
The subject of the Great Pyramid is vast, and the volume of literature on the topic overwhelming. There exist more theories and minute details concerning the Great Pyramid than one could ever hope to cover in a single book. In the main text we have distilled what, in our opinion, are the most important elements and presented a unified narrative expressing one perspective on the Great Pyramid. The appendices provide significant details and relevant citations to support the main text, as well as noteworthy alternative hypotheses.
The appendix will allow this book to serve not only as a narrative about ways to interpret the Great Pyramid but also as a practical manual or reference to approach the study of this most magnificent and profound structure, a true wonder that has survived from ancient times.
A NOTE ON MEASUREMENTIn the literature on the Great Pyramid, four sets of linear units predominantly are used: (1) the standard metric system of millimeters, centimeters, and meters; (2) the British/American system of inches and feet; (3) “pyramid inches,” “sacred cubits,” and associated units; and (4) Egyptian cubits of various lengths. Direct measurements of the Great Pyramid have generally been taken either using the British/American inches and feet or the metric millimeter, centimeter, and meter. Pyramid inches, Egyptian cubits, and so forth have then been derived from the raw data. In the appendices I have reported raw data generally in terms of the units used by the original investigator, as this tends to be the most accurate way of presenting the data. To convert metric to British/American, and vice versa, the following equivalencies are useful (with some values rounded):
The values for “Pyramid Inches,” various cubits, and so forth vary from author to author and are discussed hereafter as appropriate.
In the Great Pyramid literature, angles are given in degrees (360° to a circle), but in some cases fractions of a degree are given decimally and in other cases using minutes (represented by ‘, where there are 60 minutes to 1 degree) and seconds (represented by “, where there are 60 seconds to 1 minute, and therefore 60 times 60, or 3600, seconds to 1 degree). As an example, 51° 53’ 20” equals approximately 51.889°, but not exactly.
It is most accurate to report original data from sources using the units of the original source, and this procedure has generally been followed here.
EXTERNAL DIMENSIONS OF THE GREAT PYRAMIDEstimates of the basic dimensions of the Great Pyramid have varied considerably over the centuries (beginning in modern times with John Greaves; see Greaves, 1646, 1704, 1737), due in large part to the fact that the complete base of the pyramid was not exposed until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is now generally assumed by many writers that, in terms of ancient units, the Great Pyramid was laid out to measure 440 cubits along each base (an assumption that may have originated with Petrie in the 1880s; see Petrie, 1883; Herz-Fischler, 2000, p. 193) and with a height of 280 cubits (an idea that apparently goes back to the work of Perring in the 1830s; see Herz-Fischler, 2000, p. 193).
The cubit, represented by a hieroglyphic picture of a forearm (transliterated as “mh,” according to Herz-Fischler, 2000, p. 176), was a basic unit of length not only in ancient Egypt. The term
cubit
is derived from the Latin
cubitum
(elbow); an alternative or related term is
ell
(as in elbow, or the German
Ellbogen
). Cubit, ell, and related terms were used for various units of measure in many countries up through the nineteenth century (Herz-Fischler, 2000, p. 268). In ancient Egypt there were two basic cubits, the so-called royal cubit (generally the cubit, if not specified otherwise), which was divided into 7 palms (also known as hands; ancient Egyptian transliteration ““sp”), each palm consisting of 4 fingers (digits; ancient Egyptian transliteration “d_b‘”), and the short cubit, consisting of only 6 palms. The royal cubit was the cubit generally used in architecture and measuring land (Herz-Fischler, 2000, p. 176) and is the cubit referred to herein unless otherwise stated. Another related unit of measure was the remen (or upper arm), consisting of 5 palms (equals 20 fingers). (There was also a long unit of measure called the remen, equal to 50 cubits, and a measure of area known as a remen that was the surface area of a 50-by-100-cubit rectangle; see Herz-Fischler, 2000, p. 177.)
cubit
is derived from the Latin
cubitum
(elbow); an alternative or related term is
ell
(as in elbow, or the German
Ellbogen
). Cubit, ell, and related terms were used for various units of measure in many countries up through the nineteenth century (Herz-Fischler, 2000, p. 268). In ancient Egypt there were two basic cubits, the so-called royal cubit (generally the cubit, if not specified otherwise), which was divided into 7 palms (also known as hands; ancient Egyptian transliteration ““sp”), each palm consisting of 4 fingers (digits; ancient Egyptian transliteration “d_b‘”), and the short cubit, consisting of only 6 palms. The royal cubit was the cubit generally used in architecture and measuring land (Herz-Fischler, 2000, p. 176) and is the cubit referred to herein unless otherwise stated. Another related unit of measure was the remen (or upper arm), consisting of 5 palms (equals 20 fingers). (There was also a long unit of measure called the remen, equal to 50 cubits, and a measure of area known as a remen that was the surface area of a 50-by-100-cubit rectangle; see Herz-Fischler, 2000, p. 177.)
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