The message of the Sphinx: a quest for the hidden legacy of mankind (17 page)

This unexpected turn of events could not have come at a more vital moment—for by 21 March 1993
Upuaut II
was deep inside the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber and was, in Gantenbrink’s opinion, very close to whatever lay at the end. The exploration, however, was to go on. Destiny had fixed an amazing rendezvous for Gantenbrink on the next day, 22 March, coincidentally the spring equinox.

With him in the Queen’s Chamber on that fateful day were Jochen Breitenstein, Dirk Brakebusch and Muhammad Shahy.
[263]
By 10 a.m. Gantenbrink had managed to manoeuvre
Upuaut II
a distance of 170 feet up the shaft. At about 180 feet a sharp settlement in the floor of the shaft created a dangerous obstacle that threatened to halt progress but that was eventually surmounted. Then, barely an hour later, at 11:05 a.m., after crawling a total distance of 200 feet into the shaft, the floor and walls became smooth and polished and the robot suddenly—and one might almost say ‘in the nick of time’—reached the end of its journey.

As the first images of the ‘door’ with its peculiar metal fittings appeared on the small television monitor in the Queen’s Chamber, Rudolf Gantenbrink immediately realised the massive implications of his find. This was archaeological history in the making
[264]
—an exciting and significant new discovery inside the world’s most famous and most mysterious ancient monument. And it was interesting to note that under the lower western corner of the ‘door’ there was a little gap beneath which the red laser spot projected by
Upuaut
was seen to disappear. The urge to look under the ‘door’ and see whatever might lie beyond it must have been almost unbearable. The gap, however, was far too small for
Upuaut’s
camera to be able to peer into. A fibre-optic lens would need to be added if that was to be done, but rigging it would take days, perhaps even weeks, to organize.

After the initial excitement had died down, Gantenbrink’s first instinct was to make doubly certain that the unique video images that he had been looking at on the screen had been properly recorded. Once he was satisfied that the recordings were excellent, he and his team packed the tapes, together with the rest of their gear, and returned to their base at the Movenpick Hotel.

For several days after 22 March nothing happened, with no official announcement of any kind being made to the press by the German Archaeological Institute. The reason, it seems, was that Dr. Stadelmann could not make up his mind as to what form, exactly, such an announcement should take. During this hiatus, Gantenbrink and the film crew decided to return to Munich. They naturally took along all their equipment, including the twenty-eight videotapes shot during the exploration. A few days later, at the beginning of April 1993, Gantenbrink sent us a copy of the tape showing the discovery of the ‘door’.

We passed this tape on to the British media.

Much ado, then nothing

The first major story appeared on the front page of the London
Independent
on 16 April 1993:

Archaeologists have discovered the entrance to a previously unknown chamber within the largest of Egypt’s Pyramids. Some evidence suggests it might contain the royal treasures of the Pharaoh Cheops [Khufu], for whom the Great Pyramid was built 4500 years ago. The contents of the chamber are almost certainly intact. The entrance is at the end of a sloping passage 65 metres long but only eight inches (20 cm.) wide and eight inches high ... According to the Belgian Egyptologist Robert Bauval, the passage points directly at the Dog star Sirius, held by the ancient Egyptians to be the incarnation of the goddess Isis. Other small passages in the Pyramid appear to point to other heavenly bodies—the Belt of Orion and the star Alpha Draconis, which at the time was in the area now occupied by the Pole Star ...

The reaction to the
Independent’s
front-page splash was electrifying. Dozens of reporters from all over the world wanted to interview Gantenbrink within hours and that same evening Britain’s Channel 4 TV News covered the story in depth. Dr. I. E. S. Edwards made a rare appearance in this report and created something of a sensation by telling millions of excited viewers that ‘a statue of the king gazing towards the constellation of Orion’ might be found behind the mysterious ‘door’. ‘But it’s a wild guess—we have no precedents,’ he was quick to add.

But wild guess or not, and still with no clear statement emanating from Cairo, the international media had a field day:

‘PYRAMID MAY HOLD PHARAOH’S SECRETS’ ran the front page of
The Age
in Melbourne; ‘SECRET CHAMBER MAY SOLVE PYRAMID RIDDLE’ shouted
The Times
in London; ‘NOUVEAU MYSTERE DANS LA PYRAMIDE’
Le Monde
announced excitedly in Paris; ‘PYRAMID MYSTERY’ reported the
Los Angeles Times;
‘VIVE LA TECHNIQUE: PORTE POUR KHEOPS!’ cried
Le Matin
in Switzerland.
[265]

It was almost as though the cult of the Pyramid had suddenly come to life again. At any rate the story continued to run for many more weeks in dozens of regional newspapers and several international magazines.
[266]
Everyone, it seemed, wanted to know what was behind the little ‘door’, and why the Pyramid’s shafts were directed towards the stars ...

The first official riposte came from the German Archaeological Institute, through Reuters in Germany, on 16 April 1993. Mrs. Christine Egorov, Stadelmann’s secretary—here presented as the
Institutsprecherin—
firmly pronounced that the very idea of a possible chamber at the end of the shaft was nonsense. The Queen’s Chamber’s ‘air-channels’, she explained, did not head in the direction of anything at all and the purpose of Gantenbrink’s robot had been solely ‘to measure the humidity of the Pyramid’.
[267]

Soon afterwards, a second report went out on the Reuters wire, this time quoting Dr. Stadelmann: ‘I don’t know how this story happened but I can tell you this is very annoying,’ he fumed. ‘There is surely no other chamber ... there is no room behind the stone.’
[268]

Political games

In the years that followed Gantenbrink made repeated efforts to get his exploration of the Queen’s Chamber shafts restarted, arguing that there was no need to speculate as to whether or not the ‘door’ was really a door, or whether there might or might not be a chamber concealed behind it:

I take an absolutely neutral position. It is a scientific process, and there is no need whatsoever to answer questions with speculation when questions could be answered much more easily by continuing the research ... We have a device (ultrasonic) that would discover if there is a cavity behind the slab. It’s nonsensical to make theories when we have the tools to discover the facts.’
[269]

One of the main problems that Gantenbrink faced was that he did not belong to the Egyptological profession but was regarded by the leading academics at Giza as a hired technician—which meant, by definition, that his views were assumed to have no merit. He explained how, after discovering the slab-door in March 1993, he had been all but ignored and the find handled with indifference: ‘I was scheduled to meet the Minister of Culture about the discovery, but it never happened. A press conference was scheduled. It never happened.’
[270]

In late 1994, Gantenbrink announced in Paris that he was willing to supply the robot to the Egyptians and even train an Egyptian technician at his own expense so that the exploration could resume, but a few weeks later he was politely rebuffed by the EAO’s Chairman, Dr. Nur El Din: ‘Thank you for your offer to train the Egyptian technician [Nur El Din had written] ... unfortunately we are very busy for the time being, therefore we will postpone the matter.’
[271]

‘The search for truth’, Gantenbrink commented in January 1995, ‘is too important to be ruined by a silly political game. My only hope is that they will soon reach the same conclusions.’
[272]

Breakfast with Gantenbrink

On 19 February 1995 we arrived in Egypt and the next morning had breakfast with Rudolf Gantenbrink at the Movenpick Hotel in Giza.

He had been in Egypt for most of the previous week, still trying to obtain permission to resume his exploration of the Queen’s Chamber shafts, and was returning to Munich later that morning. During his visit, he told us, he had finally managed to have a face-to-face meeting with Dr. Nur El Din.

‘What was the response?’ we asked.

Gantenbrink shrugged his shoulders: ‘Encouraging.’ But he looked less than encouraged.

We then asked if he had been back inside the Queen’s Chamber on this visit.

‘No,’ he replied, ‘I prefer not to go there.’

He could not bear the thought, he told us, of returning to the site of his great discovery without his robot, purposelessly, like a tourist. ‘I will go back in the Queen’s Chamber with
Upuaut
and complete the exploration of the shafts,’ he said proudly, ‘or I won’t go back there at all.’

Select groups

That same month—February 1995—one of the most prosperous and active members of the Association for Research and Enlightenment spoke to us by telephone from the United States about plans that were in hand for furthering the quest for the Hall of Records at the Giza necropolis:

The next three years are going to be super years ... We sort of have ‘96 set up for our little expedition to the Sphinx—with underground radar. 1996 was when Zahi said we’d be able to go. We’ll do more ground-scanning and most of all we’re going to get to love and understand the people around us, and the various groups, and work with them ... and I figure that by ’98 we’ll hit something.
[273]

We learnt in the same conversation that the same individual had been keeping a close watch on events surrounding the hidden door in the Great Pyramid during the two years since Rudolf Gantenbrink’s project had ground to a halt. He claimed to have been informed that the Egyptian authorities would soon make an attempt to reach the door with their own robot in order to insert a fibre-optic camera beneath it and to see whatever lies beyond. Our informant also said that he had been invited by ‘Zahi’ to be amongst the select group of witnesses present inside the Pyramid when this moment eventually comes: ‘He promised me a one-month’s advance notice before they do anything ... Something’s definitely going to happen. He’s not sure when. He had delays—I think with the robot—but they’ll get it done ...’
[274]

But what exactly will get done? By whom? With what motive? How certain is it that the public will be properly informed about any further discoveries that might be made? And how reliable and comprehensive are the orthodox Egyptological interpretations of such discoveries likely to be?

One thing at any rate seems certain: Rudolf Gantenbrink, whose inventiveness and daring led to the original discovery of the door at the end of the Queen’s Chamber’s mysterious southern shaft, is unlikely to be present. In September 1995 it was reported to us that the Egyptian Antiquities Organization had issued notification to the German authorities advising that they did not wish to pursue the exploration in the Great Pyramid.
[275]

Burial

After reviewing the scholarly goings on concerning the possible geological antiquity of the Sphinx and the ‘anomalies’ located in the bedrock beneath it, the case of the iron plate in the southern shaft of the King’s Chamber, and the case of the relics found in the shafts of the Queen’s Chamber, we are frankly not surprised by the case of Gantenbrink’s ‘door’. Here, too, orthodox academics have participated in the burial of research that promises new insights into the Giza monuments and—more than three years after the discovery—the ‘door’ still remained unopened.

We have no opinion as to whether or not it might lead to a ‘Hall of Records’—‘records’ on papyrus scrolls to do with the ‘religion’ of the builders as Zahi Hawass speculated in 1993 during his year of absence from his post as Director of the Giza Pyramids.
[276]
Our own research has convinced us, however, that the shaft in which Rudolf Gantenbrink made his remarkable discovery is linked to an archaic system of beliefs and rituals that envisaged the monuments of the Giza necropolis as an ‘image of heaven’.

In Parts III and IV we will attempt to decode this image and learn its meaning.

Part III

Duality

Chapter 8

The Clues of Duality

‘Newton ... was the last of the magicians ... Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked at the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret that could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the heavens ... partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the bretheren ... By pure thought, by concentration of mind, the riddle, he believed, would be revealed to the initiate ...’

John Maynard Keynes, The Royal Society, Newton Tercentenary Celebrations, 1947

We saw in Parts I and II how the astronomical character of the architecture of the Sphinx and of the Giza Pyramids has failed to interest Egyptologists and has not been taken into account in their analysis of the function and significance of the monuments. This, in our view, has resulted in a number of serious misinterpretations of the available evidence—perhaps the most flagrant examples of which, at the level of physical exploration and research, have been the chronic neglect of the four astronomically aligned shafts of the Great Pyramid and the long and shocking period of inactivity over the matter of the ‘door’ in the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber.

We hinted at the end of Part I that the logic of all these shafts, and of the ground-plan and symbolism of the Pyramids and the Sphinx, appears to be connected to certain very powerful religious and cosmological ideas set out in ancient Egyptian funerary and rebirth texts and in the so-called ‘Hermetic’ writings. These express the philosophy ‘as above, so below’ and advocate the drawing down to earth of cosmic powers as an essential step in Mankind’s quest for knowledge of the divine and immortality of the soul: ‘And I, said Hermes, will make Mankind intelligent, I will confer wisdom on them, and make known to them the truth. I will never cease to benefit thereby the life of mortal men; and then will I benefit each one of them, when the force of nature working in him is in accord with the movement of the stars above.’
[277]

In the following chapters we will offer evidence to suggest that the extraordinary monuments of the Giza necropolis are part of a grand and long-forgotten scheme to initiate certain select individuals, the most recent of whom were the Pharaohs of Egypt, into an esoteric cosmic wisdom linking earth to heaven by means of which they sincerely expected to transcend the limits of death:

All the world which lies below has been set in order and filled with contents by the things which are placed above; for the things below have not the power to set in order the world above. The weaker mysteries must yield to the stronger; and the system of things on high is stronger than the things below.
[278]

Thy protector is the Star-God ... thy soul passeth on ... thy body is equipped with power ... The doors of the hidden land are opened before thee ... Osiris, conqueror of millions of years, cometh unto thee ...
[279]

Cosmic environment

The world view of the ancient Egyptians, which they appear to have inherited intact and fully formed at the very beginning of their historical civilization some 5000 years ago, was profoundly dualistic and cosmological. The foundation of Pharaonic theocracy, the unification of the ‘Two Lands’ of Upper and Lower Egypt into one kingdom, the notions that they had of their own past and ancestry, their laws and calendrical measures, the architecture of their temples and pyramid complexes, and even the land of Egypt itself and the Nile—all these were cosmological concepts to them. Indeed, they saw their cosmic environment (the sky, the Milky Way, the sun and the stars, the moon and the planets, and all their cycles) as being bound together in perfect duality with their earthly environment (their land and the Nile, their living king and his ancestors, and the cycles of the seasons and epochs).

We suspect that the history of ancient Egypt, to the extent that it was written down
at all
in papyri and tablets and inscriptions, was frequently expressed in a kind of ‘cosmic code’ ritualistically and symbolically linked—like the Pyramids themselves—to the ever-changing patterns of the sky. From this it follows that we must look to the sky, just as the Egyptians did, if we wish to understand the ideas that they were trying to communicate in their (on the face of things) extremely strange and problematic religious writings. These writings include mysterious and archaic texts aimed at guiding the afterlife journey of the deceased, such as the
Book of the Dead
(which the ancient Egyptians knew as
Per-Ém-Hru,
the Book of ‘Coming Forth By Day’), the
Book of Two Ways,
the
Book of Gates,
the
Book of What is in the Duat
and the
Coffin Texts.
Oldest and most enigmatic of all these funerary and rebirth documents however, are the so-called
Pyramid Texts
which began to be copied and compiled from older sources in the second half of the third millennium BC. These remarkable records have come down to us in the form of lavish hieroglyphic inscriptions on the tomb walls of a number of Fifth—and Sixth-Dynasty pyramids at Saqqara, some ten miles to the south of the Giza necropolis, and offer us a hitherto neglected key by means of which the secrets of the great Pyramids and the Sphinx can be unlocked.

Astronomical essence

All the above-named documents, and many more, have been translated into modern languages during the past hundred years, and all have been studied by scholars—the majority of whom would not dispute that they incorporate a complex network of astronomical references, symbols, allegories and allusions.
[280]
Only a handful of researchers, however, have considered the possibility that these astronomical characteristics could constitute the
essence
of the texts. In this group the late Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, whose study,
Hamlet’s Mill,
we encountered in Chapter 4, have commented on the manner in which the soul of the deceased Pharaoh was thought of as having travelled through the skies:

... well-equipped ... with his Pyramid Text or Coffin Text, which represented his indispensable timetable and contained the ordained addresses of every celestial individual he was expected to meet. The Pharaoh relied upon his particular text as the less distinguished dead relied upon his copy of chapters from the
Book of the Dead,
and he was prepared to change shape into the ... semblance of whatever celestial ‘station’ must be passed, and to recite the fitting formulae to overcome hostile beings ...
[281]

Santillana and von Dechend also comment, somewhat witheringly, on the hopeless inadequacy of many of the translations that scholars work with today—translations which treat the astronomical aspects of the texts as though they are of no particular relevance:

So the elaborate instructions in the
Book of the Dead,
referring to the soul’s celestial voyage, translate into ‘mystical’ talk, and must be treated as holy mumbo jumbo. But then, modern translators believe so firmly in their own invention, according to which the underworld has to be looked for in the interior of our globe—instead of in the sky—that even 370 specific astronomical terms would not cause them to stumble.
[282]

The problem identified here is, we will demonstrate, a large and multi-faceted one which has led scholarly analysis of the texts into a blind alley through a complete and conspicuous neglect of: (a) the most important religious concept of the ancient Egyptians; (b) the most vital feature of their land and sky and (c) the most fundamental element of their spiritual and cosmological beliefs.

Otherworld

In the earliest religious writings that have survived from ancient Egypt a powerful symbolic terminology is used to describe the cosmic ‘world of the dead’ and its features. This world is referred to as the
Duat
[283]
—a concept that is routinely translated by modern Egyptologists as ‘the Underworld’ (or sometimes as the ‘Netherworld’).
[284]
In the Pyramid Texts, however, the
Duat
is clearly a location in the starry sky—as many distinguished Egyptologists of earlier generations such as Selim Hassan, Sir E. A. Wallis Budge and Kurt Sethe were undoubtedly aware.
[285]
Yet even these pioneers failed to get to grips with the full implications and characteristics of the concept because they lacked familiarity with astronomy.

For example, in his analysis of the various ways in which the word
Duat
was inscribed in hieroglyphic characters throughout the whole span of Egyptian history, Selim Hassan makes the following comment: ‘If we consider the evidence afforded by the meaning of its name during the Old Kingdom [the Pyramid Age], we shall see that the original
Duat,
the future Underworld, was localized in the sky.’
[286]
He then cites the view of Kurt Sethe that ‘the
Duat
could be either the red glow of twilight which precedes the dawn (i.e. the “false dawn”) or the spacious region in the east of the sky where this glow appears ...’
[287]

Hassan goes on to quote from line 151 of the Pyramid Texts: ‘Orion has been enveloped by the
Duat;
while he who lives in the Horizon (i.e. Re [the sun-god]) purifies himself; Sothis [Sirius] has been enveloped by the
Duat
... in the embrace of [their] father Atum.’

In Hassan’s opinion: ‘This clearly shows how, as the sun rises and purifies himself in the Horizon, the stars Orion and Sothis [Sirius], with whom the King is identified, are enveloped by the
Duat.
This is a true observation of nature, and it really appears as though the stars are swallowed up each morning in the increasing glow of the dawn. Perhaps the determinative of the word
Duat,
the star within a circle, illustrates the idea of this enveloping of the star. When on his way to join the stars, the dead king must first pass by (or through) the
Duat
which will serve to guide him in the right direction. Thus we see in Utterance 610 [of the Pyramid Texts]: “The
Duat
guides your feet to the Dwelling-place of Orion ... The
Duat
guides your hand to the Dwelling-place of Orion.” ...’
[288]

Stars rising with the sun

Hassan’s assessment of the celestial landscape of the
Duat
is only accurate in as much as he realizes that it is in the east, that the moment of observation is the pre-dawn (which he calls ‘false dawn’, and that the constellation of Orion (Osiris), the star Sirius (Isis), the sun (Re), and some other cosmic feature representing ‘Atum’ (the ‘Father’ of the Gods), are all to be found in the
Duat.
Because he is not conversant with basic celestial mechanics, however, and because he fails to set the relevant lines from the Pyramid Texts in the context of their time and their place, he then goes on to make a serious error of interpretation which has subsequently been compounded by numerous other astronomically illiterate scholars:

1.
       
The time the Pyramid Texts were compiled was the epoch of 2800 BC to 2300 BC approximately.
[289]

2.
       
The place of observation of the sky was just south of modern Cairo in the so-called ‘Memphite necropolis’ (named after
Men-nefer,
later ‘Memphis’, the first historically recognized capital of ancient Egypt), where stand the great Pyramids of Giza (and also lesser Old Kingdom pyramids such as those at Abu Roash, Abusir, Saqqara, Dahshur and Meidum).
[290]

3.
       
The error that Hassan makes is his assumption that the stars in question—i.e. Orion and Sirius—are swallowed up ‘each morning’ in the ‘increasing glow of the dawn.’

34. The ‘Memphite necropolis’—Pyramid fields from Abu Roash to Dahshur.