The message of the Sphinx: a quest for the hidden legacy of mankind (30 page)

4.
       
By looking at simulations of the ancient skies would we not, to use the language of the Egyptian funerary texts, be ‘going down to any sky we wished to go down to’?

5.
       
Is it an accident that so many of these texts have survived for thousands of years, or could their compilers have
intended
them to survive and carefully designed them in such a way that human nature would ensure their copying and recopying down the ages (a process that has been promiscuously resumed in the last century and a half, since the decipherment of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, with the Coffin Texts, the Pyramid Texts, the Book of the Dead, etc., etc., now translated and reprinted in dozens of modern languages and editions—and even available on CD-ROM)?

6.
       
In other words, is it not possible in our readings of the texts, and in our analysis of the rituals to which they were linked, that we have stumbled upon a
message
of primordial antiquity that was composed not just for the Pyramid Age, and not just for the Horus-Kings of ancient Egypt, but for all ‘seekers after the truth’—from any culture, in any epoch—who might be ‘equipped’ to put texts and monuments together and to view the skies of former times?

Chapter 16

Message in a Bottle?

‘We have reached this fascinating point in our evolution ... we have reached the time when we know we can talk to each other across the distances between the stars ...’

Dr. John Billingham, NASA Ames Research Center, 1995

Together with the ancient texts and rituals that are linked to them, could the vast monuments of the Giza necropolis have been designed to transmit
a message
from one culture to another—a message not across space, but across time?

Egyptologists reply to such questions by rolling their eyes and hooting derisively. Indeed they would not
be
‘Egyptologists’ (or at any rate they could not long remain within that profession) if they reacted with anything other than scorn and disbelief to suggestions that the necropolis might be more than a cemetery, that the Great Sphinx might significantly predate the epoch of 2500 BC, and that the Pyramids might not be just ‘royal tombs’. By the same token, no self-respecting Egyptologist would be prepared to consider, even for a moment, the outlandish possibility that some sort of mysterious ‘message’ might have been encoded into the monuments.

So whom should we turn to for advice when confronted by what we suspect may be a message from a civilization so far distant from us in time as to be almost unknowable?

Anti-cipher

The only scientists actively working on such problems today are those involved in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—SETI for short. They endlessly sweep the heavens for messages from distant civilizations and they have therefore naturally had to give some thought to what might happen if they ever did identify such a message. According to Dr. Philip Morisson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

To begin with we would know very little about it. If we received it we would not understand what we’re getting. But we would have an unmistakable signal, full of structure, full of challenge. The best people would try to decode it, and it will be easy to do because those who have constructed it would have made it easy to decode, otherwise there’s no point. This is anti-cryptography: ‘I want to make a message for you, who never got in touch with any symbols of mine, no key no clue, nevertheless you’ll be able to read it ...’ I would have to fill it full of clues and unmistakable clever devices ...
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In his book,
Cosmos,
Professor Carl Sagan of Cornell University makes much the same point—and does so, curiously enough, with reference to the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic system. He explains that the ‘Egyptian hieroglyphics are, in significant part, a simple substitution cipher. But not every hieroglyph is a letter or syllable. Some are pictographs ...’ When it came to translation, this ‘mix of letters and pictographs caused some grief for interpreters ...’ In the early nineteenth century, however, a breakthrough was made by the French scholar Champollion who deciphered the famous ‘Rosetta Stone’, a slab of black basalt bearing identical inscriptions in Egyptian hieroglyphics and in Greek. Since Champollion could read the Greek, all he needed was some kind of ‘key’ to relate specific hieroglyphs to specific Greek words or letters. This key was provided by the constant repetition in the Greek text of the name of Pharaoh Ptolemy V and an equal number of repetitions in the Egyptian text of a distinctive oblong enclosure—known as a cartouche—containing a repeated group of hieroglyphs. As Sagan comments:

The cartouches were the key ... almost as though the Pharaohs of Egypt had circled their own names to make the going easier for Egyptologists two thousand years in the future ... What a joy it must have been [for Champollion] to open this one-way communication channel with another civilization, to permit a culture that had been mute for millennia to speak of its history, magic, medicine, religion, politics and philosophy.
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Professor Sagan then offers a comparison that is highly apposite to our present inquiry. ‘Today,’ he says:

we are again seeking messages from an ancient and exotic civilization, this time hidden from us not only in time, but in space. If we should receive a radio message from an extraterrestrial civilization, how could it possibly be understood? Extraterrestrial intelligence will be
elegant, complex, internally consistent and utterly alien.
Extraterrestrials would, of course, wish to make a message sent to us as comprehensible as possible. But how could they? Is there in any sense an interstellar Rosetta Stone? We believe there is a common language that all technical civilizations, no matter how different, must have. That common language is science and mathematics. The laws of Nature are the same everywhere.
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It seems to us that if there is indeed a very ancient ‘message’ at Giza then it is likely to be expressed in the language of science and mathematics that Sagan identifies—and for the same reason. Moreover, given its need to continue ‘transmitting’ coherently across thousands of years (and chasms of cultural change), we think that the composer of such a message would be likely to make use of the Precession of the Equinoxes, the one particular ‘law of Nature’ that can be said to govern, and measure—and identify—long periods of terrestrial time.

Durable vehicles

The Pyramids and the Great Sphinx at Giza are, above all else, as elegant, as complex, as internally consistent and as utterly ‘alien’ as the extraterrestrial intelligence that Sagan envisages (alien in the sense of the tremendous, almost superhuman scale of these structures and of their uncanny—and in our terms apparently unnecessary—precision).

Moreover, returning briefly to Dr. Philip Morisson’s remarks quoted earlier, we think that the Giza necropolis also qualifies rather well for the description ‘packed full of clues and unmistakable clever devices’.
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Indeed, it seems to us that a truly astonishing quantum of ingenuity was invested by the Pyramid builders to ensure that the four fundamental aspects of an ‘unmistakable’ message were thoroughly elaborated here:

1.
       
the creation of durable, unequivocal markers which could serve as beacons to inflame the curiosity and engage the intelligence of future generations of seekers;

2.
       
the use of the ‘common language’ of precessional astronomy;

3.
       
the use of precessional co-ordinates to signal specific time-referents linking past to present and present to future;

4.
       
Cunningly concealed store-rooms, or ‘Halls of Records’ that could only be found and entered by those who were fully initiated in the ‘silent language’ and thus could read and follow its clues.

In addition, though the monuments are enabled to ‘speak’ from the moment that their astronomical context is understood, we have also to consider the amazing profusion of funerary texts that have come down to us from all periods of Egyptian history—all apparently emanating from the same very few common sources.
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As we have seen, these texts operate like ‘software’ to the monuments’ ‘hardware’, charting the route that the Horus-King (and all other future seekers) must follow.

We recall a remark made by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend in
Hamlet’s Mill
to the effect that the great strength of myths as vehicles for specific technical information is that they are capable of transmitting that information independently of the knowledge of individual story-tellers.
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In other words as long as a myth continues to be told true, it will also continue to transmit any higher message that may be concealed within its structure—even if neither the teller nor the hearer understands that message.

So, too, we suspect, with the ancient Egyptian funerary texts. We would be surprised if the owners of many of the coffins and tomb walls onto which they were copied had even the faintest inkling that specific astronomical observations and directions were being duplicated at their expense. What motivated them was precisely what the texts offered—the lure of immortal life. Yet by taking that lure did they not in fact guarantee a kind of immortality for the texts themselves? Did they not ensure that so many faithful copies would be made that some at least would be bound to survive for many thousands of years?

We think that there were always people who understood the true ‘science of immortality’ connected to the texts, and who were able to read the astronomical allegories in which deeper secrets, not granted to the common herd, lay concealed. We presume that these people were once called the ‘Followers of Horus’, that they operated as an invisible college behind the scenes in Egyptian prehistory and history, that their primary cult centre was at Giza-Heliopolis, and that they were responsible for the initiation of kings and the realization of blueprints. We also think that the timetables they worked to—and almost everything of significance that they did—was in one way or another written in the stars.

Hints and memories

The powerfully astronomical character of the Giza necropolis, although ignored by Egyptologists, has been recognized by open-minded and intuitive researchers throughout history. The Hermetic Neoplatonists of Alexandria, for example, appear to have been acutely sensitive to the possibility of a ‘message’ and were quick to discern the strong astral qualities of the textual material and the monuments.
[632]
The scholar Proclus (fifth century AD) also acknowledged that the Great Pyramid was astronomically designed—and with certain specific stars in mind. Indeed, in his commentary on Plato’s
Timaeus
(which deals with the story of the lost civilization of ‘Atlantis’), Proclus reported strangely that ‘the Great Pyramid was used as an observation for Sirius’.
[633]

Vague memories of an astronomically constructed ‘message’ at Giza appear to have filtered down to the Middle Ages. At any rate the Arab chroniclers in this period spoke of the Great Pyramid as ‘a temple to the stars’ and frequently connected it to the Biblical ‘Flood’ which they dated to
circa
10,300 BC.
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Also of relevance is a report written by the Arab geographer Yakut al Hamawi (eleventh century AD) to the effect that the star-worshippers of Harran, the Sabians (whose ‘holy books’ were supposedly the writings of Thoth-Hermes) came at that time on special pilgrimages to the Pyramids at Giza.
[635]
It has also been pointed out that the very name of the Sabians—in Arabic
Sa’Ba—
almost certainly derived from the ancient Egyptian word for star, i.e.
Sba
.
[636]
And the reader will recall from Part I that as far back as the early second millennium BC—i.e. almost
three thousand years
before Yakut al Hamawi left us his report connecting the Sabians to the Pyramids—pilgrims from Harran are known to have visited the Sphinx which they worshipped as a god under the name
Hwl
.
[637]

In the seventeenth century, the British mathematician Sir Isaac Newton became deeply interested in the Great Pyramid and wrote a dissertation on its mathematical and geodetic qualities based on data that had been gathered at Giza by Dr. John Greaves, the Savillian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford.
[638]
Later, in 1865 the Astronomer Royal of Scotland, Charles Piazzi Smyth, launched an investigation into the Great Pyramid which he was convinced was an instrument of prophecy that incorporated a Messianic ‘message’. It was Piazzi Smyth who first accurately measured and demonstrated the intense polar and meridional alignments of the monument, the precision of which he assigned to sightings of the ancient Pole star, Alpha Draconis.
[639]

In the first half of the twentieth century, a succession of eminent astronomers—such as Richard Proctor, Eugene Antoniadi, Jean Baptiste Biot and Norman Lockyer—made persistent attempts to draw attention to the astronomical qualities of the Giza monuments. Their efforts, however, had little impact on professional Egyptologists who by this time felt that they had got the whole intellectual business of the necropolis ‘wrapped up’ (it was a cemetery), did not understand astronomy at all (and claimed that the ancient Egyptians didn’t either), and routinely ganged up to debunk, deride or simply ignore any astronomical ‘theories’ which diverged from their consensus.

Despite this hostile intellectual climate, we are of the opinion at the end of our own research that the big question is no longer
whether
the monuments of Giza were designed to express key astronomical and mathematical principles, but
why.

Once again, the clue may lie in the narrow star-shafts of the Great Pyramid.

The language of the stars

The first major breakthrough in understanding the function of the Great Pyramid’s shafts was made in the summer of 1963 by the American astronomer Virginia Trimble and the Egyptologist-architect, Dr. Alexander Badawy. It came about because they decided to follow up Badawy’s ‘hunch’ that the shafts might not be ‘ventilation channels’ as Egyptologists supposed,
[640]
but might instead prove to have a symbolic function related to the astral rituals of the Pyramid builders. Virginia Trimble was able to buttress her colleague’s intuition by showing that the shafts from the King’s Chamber had pointed, in the epoch of 2500 BC, to major star systems that were of crucial importance to the Pyramid builders. As readers will recall from Part I, the northern shaft had been targeted on Alpha Draconis—the Pole Star in the Pyramid Age—and the southern shaft had been targeted on Orion’s belt.
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Today Virginia Trimble is a senior professor of astronomy at UCLA and the University of Maryland and is also the Vice-President of the American Astronomical Society. Her views, as well as being enlightened by a comprehensive grasp of astronomy, accord fully with common sense:

Which constellations the Egyptians saw in the sky is still something of a mystery ... but they had one constellation that was an erect standing man, Osiris, the god. And the one constellation that looks like a standing man to everyone is Orion, and the identification between a deceased Pharaoh and the god Osiris made Orion immediately a candidate for a shaft whose sole purpose was to enable the soul of the Pharaoh to communicate between earth and sky ...
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