Egypt: Call of the Sphinx

'When the Oxford astronomer John Greaves visited Egypt in the seventeenth century he collected ancient local traditions which attributed the construction of the three Giza pyramids to a mythical antediluvian king:

The occasion of this was because he saw in his sleep that the whole earth was turned over, with the inhabitants of it lying upon their faces and the stars falling down and striking one another with a terrible noise ... And he awakened with greate feare, and assembled the chief priests of all provinces of Egypt ... He related the whole matter to them and they took the altitude of the stars, and made their prognostication, and they foretold of a deluge. The king said, will it come to our country? They answered yes, and will destroy it. And there remained a certain number of years to come, and he commanded in the mean space to build the Pyramids ... And he engraved in these Pyramids all things that were told by wise men, as also all profound sciences - the science of Astrology, and of Arithmaticke, and of Geometry, and of Psychicke. All this may be interpreted by him that knowes their characters and language...'[1]

'The Sacred Sermon, a Hermetic text of Egyptian origin speaks with awe of lordly men 'devoted to the growth of wisdom' who lived 'before the Flood' and whose civilization was destroyed:

'And there shall be memorials mighty of their handiworks upon the earth, leaving dim trace behind when cycles are renewed ...'[2]

The Great Pyramid at Giza is the last surviving of the Seven Wonders of the World. Most of the Wonders were destroyed by earthquakes and other natural disasters, some were destroyed by the hand of man. Though the shining white casing that once armored the Pyramids fell away and was cannibalized for the early construction of Cairo, the Great Pyramid remains, silent, awesome and enigmatic, still posing questions which elicit answers that demand more questions until we are left baffled by the magnitude of the intelligence that went into its original conception.

Some of the theories behind the construction of the Pyramids have been discussed in another part of this site. They can be accessed by clicking on the pyramid icon above. There you'll find some evidence of how the Great Pyramid subtly links with the universal mythology the ancients left us.

The Great Pyramid holds many puzzles to draw the curiosity of the active mind. Amongst those outside are several boat-shaped pits along the monument's southern side, containing ocean-going vessels a 100 feet and more long. One of the pits was excavated in the 1950's. The 141 foot cedar wood ship found inside remains in perfect condition, 4500 years since it was built, and can be viewed in the so-called Boat Museum near the Pyramid.

'With a displacement of around 40 tons, its design was particularly thought-provoking, incorporating, in the words of one expert, 'all the sea-going ship's characteristic properties, with prow and stern soaring upward, higher than a Viking ship, to ride out the breakers and high seas, not to contend with the little ripples of the Nile.'

Another authority felt that the careful and clever design of this strange pyramid boat could potentially have made it 'a far more seaworthy craft than anything available to Columbus.' Moreover, the experts agreed that it had been built to a pattern that could only have been 'created by shipbuilders from a people with a long, solid tradition of sailing on the open sea.'[1]

Egyptologists hold that these sophisticated (and big) ships were built and then buried in the sand to act solely as vessels to transport the soul of the deceased Egyptian king to the heavens. Independent scholars call this into question, citing the Ancient Egyptians' skill in making scale models and representations of all kinds of things for symbolic purposes.

Further, this is not the first time ancient mariners, mapmakers and shipbuilders have come to light in connection with the birth of civilizations. We can safely keep the ships in mind.

Napoleon is said to have been fascinated by the Pyramids - he went so far as to spend a night inside the Great Pyramid during his conquest of Egypt:

'He emerged the next morning looking pale and shaken, having experienced something that had profoundly disturbed him and about which he never afterwards spoke.'[3]

In the heart of the Great Pyramid, in what is called the King's Chamber, lies a lidless, dark chocolate-colored granite sarcophagus. This object is what Egyptologists allege the entire Great Pyramid was built to house. When the King's Chamber was first opened it was bare and empty, for all but the sarcophagus - which was also empty. The sarcophagus' exterior measurements were 7 feet 5.62 inches in length, 3 feet 5.31 inches in depth, and 3 feet 2.5 inches in width - an inch too wide, incidentally, for it to have been carried up through the lower entrance to the ascending corridor leading up to the King's Chamber.

Some routine mathematical games were built into the dimensions of the sarcophagous. For example, it had an internal volume of 1166.4 litres and an external volume exactly twice that 2332.8 liters. Such a precise coincidence could not have been arrived at accidentally: the walls of the coffer had been cut to machine-age tolerances by craftsmen of enormous skill and experience.

The only way granite of such hardness could have been cut is with massive saws with cutting points harder than jewels.

"The character of the work would certainly seem to point to diamond as being the cutting jewel; and only considerations of its rarity in general, and its absence from Egypt, interfere with this conclusion..."[4]

An even greater mystery surrounds the hollowing out of the sarcophagous. The visible evidence suggested circular drills were used, with the same jeweled blades. This brings up more questions.

"The amount of pressure, shown by the rapidity with which the drills and saws pierced through the hard stones, is very surprising; probably a load of at least a ton or two was placed on the 4-inch drills cutting in the granite. On the granite core No 7 the spiral of the cut sinks 1 inch in the circumference of 6 inches, a rate of ploughing out which is astonishing ... These rapid spiral grooves cannot be ascribed to anything but the descent of the drill into the granite under enormous pressure..."[4]

Hancock sums it up clearly:

'Wasn't it peculiar that at the supposed dawn of human civilization, more than 4,500 years ago, the Ancient Egyptians had acquired what sounded like industrial-age drills packing a ton or more of punch and capable of slicing through hard stones like hot knives through butter?'[1]

Further evidence of such advanced technological workmanship is scattered throughout Egypt, Giza in particular. Flinders Petrie, from whom the former quotations came, was unable to explain the kind of instrument capable of cutting hieroglyphs into a number of diorite bowls which he found at Giza. Diorite is one of the hardest stones on earth, far harder even than iron. Besides the bowls, tens of thousands of stone vessels have been discovered in the Step Pyramid of Zoser, as well as in pre-dynastic strata dated several thousand years earlier. These had been mysteriously hollowed out of a range of materials such as diorite, basalt, quartz crystal and 'metamorphic schist'. Hancock studied them and poses the appropriate questions:

'Whether they were made in 2500 BC or in 4000 BC or even earlier, the stone vessels from the Step Pyramid were remarkable for their workmanship, which once again seemed to been accomplished by some as yet imagined (and, indeed, almost unimaginable) tool.

Why unimaginable? Because many of the vessels were tall vases with long, thin, elegant necks and widely flared interiors often incorporating fully hollowed-out shoulders. No instrument yet invented was capable of carving vases into shapes like these, because such an instrument would have had to have been narrow enough to have passed through the necks and strong enough (and of the right shape) to have scoured out the shoulders and the rounded interiors. And how could sufficient upward and outward pressure have been generated and applied within the vases to achieve these effects?'[1]

These of course weren't the only unusual vessels unearthed. Nevertheless ...

'In all cases what was really perplexing was the precision with which the interiors and exteriors of these vessels had been made to correspond - curve matching curve - over absolutely smooth, polished surfaces with no tool marks visible.

There was no technology known to have been available to the Ancient Egyptians capable of achieving such results. Nor, for that matter, would any stone-carver today be able to match them, even if he were working with the best tungsten-carbide tools. The implication, therefore, is that an unknown or secret technology had been put to use in Ancient Egypt.'[1]



Let's return to the pyramids themselves, and another source. Like Velikovsky, Hancock's research tends to dominate the field at times. Without elaborating on the matter further myself, I will take an extract concerning the Pyramids of Giza from the thoughtful and convincing work of Rand and Rose Flem-Ath, When the Sky Fell, In Search of Atlantis.

'In 1994, another remarkable event occurred with the publication of Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert's The Orion Mystery. They discovered that the layout of Egypt's great pyramids followed the pattern of the constellation Orion as it would have appeared in the year 10,450 BC. Orion, representing a giant star-belted god striding across the heavens, appears near the Milky Way, which to the Egyptians seems to flow in an immense stream across the heavens. Its counterpart on earth was the Nile river. The three pyramids of Giza mirror the positions of the three stars of Orion's 'belt'.

Bauval and Gilbert, using precessional astronomy, dated the actual construction of the Great Pyramid to 2450 B. But unexpectedly, they discovered that although the massive stones were placed at this time, the layout of the pyramids depicted the pattern of Orion at the much earlier time of 10,500 BC.'

Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock follow the study up in Keeper of Genesis, pointing out that the 'Bent' and 'Red' Pyramids of Dashur - 20 miles away - correlate very precisely with the pattern in the sky of the two most prominent stars in the Hyades, the horns of the Taurus constellation.

The mystery of Giza is of course not confined to the Pyramids. The 200-ton limestone blocks used in the construction of the Valley Temple, and the Osireion much farther south are another enigma. Even with late twentieth-century technology there are only a handful of cranes in the world that could lift and position such gargantuan stones. The perplexing mystery of how the Pyramids themselves were built are too well-known to enter into here, but present even more impossibilities.

By following the trail of astronomy Bauval and Gilbert had come to an independent conclusion that the Pyramids' original lay-out corresponded to the period 10,500 BCE. Another independent conclusion upsetting Egyptologists came unexpectedly from the science of geology. The evidence of the American scholar John Anthony West focused on certain structures - notably the Great Sphinx, Valley Temple and Osireion.

'He argued that these desert monuments showed many scientifically unmistakable signs of having been weathered by water, an erosive agent they could only have been exposed to in sufficient t quantities during the the damp 'pluvial' period that accompanied the end of the last Ice Age around the eleventh millennium BC. The implication of this peculiar and extremely distinctive pattern of 'precipitation induced' weathering, was that the Osireion, the Sphinx, and other associated structures were built before 10,000 BC.'[1]

The effect this had on Egyptologists was summed up in the NBC-TV presentation, the Mystery of the Sphinx:

"West is really the academic's worst nightmare, because here comes somebody way out of left-field with a thoroughly well thought out, well presented, coherently described theory, full of data they can't refute, and it pulls the rug out from under their feet. So how do they deal with it? They ignore it. They hope it'll go away ... and it won't go away."

Dr. Robert Schoch, a professor of Geology at the Boston University played a prominent role in validating West's theory concerning the true age of the Sphinx after visiting the site himself. Schoch's conclusions were later endorsed by 300 peers at the 1992 annual convention of the Geological Society of America.

'Since then, most often out of the public eye, an acrimonious debate had begun to smoulder between the geologists and the Egyptologists. And though very few people other than John West were prepared to say as much, what was at stake in this dispute was a complete upheaval in accepted views about the evolution of human civilization.'[1]

According to West:

'We are told that the evolution of human civilization is a linear process - that it goes from stupid cavemen to smart old us with our hydrogen bombs and striped toothpaste. But the proof of the Sphinx is that many, many thousands of years older than the archeologists think it is, that it preceded by many thousands of years even dynastic Egypt, means that there must have been, at some distant point in history, a high and sophisticated civilization - just as all the legends affirm.'[5]

A high and sophisticated civilization, which the legends do affirm, once inhabited Egypt. This is what the geologists infer and the astronomers deduce. It is also, of course, something that independent scholars have suspected long before Napoleon, and ever since, until recently. Now it would appear we are getting verification, new proofs, that delve deeper into the history of mankind than the establishment of orthodox learning is prepared to accept.

"Egyptologists find facts to fit their theories when they should be making theories based on the facts."[6]

Edgar Cayce, America's famous 'Sleeping Prophet', predicted that a chamber would be discovered beneath the Sphinx - a chamber containing the recorded history of human civilization.

CONTINUE

[Apocalypse Aerie] [The Einstein Connection] [Ancient Maps] [Earth Crust Displacement] [Myths of Catastrophism] [History & Science in Myth] [Egypt; The Call of the Sphinx] [India; A Cradle for Civilization] [America; Fear of the Dark] [World Ocean; Path to Atlantis] [Precession; Warning of the Ancients] [Epilogue & Links]
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Copyright © Marc Bergvelt. 1998-2002. All Rights Reserved.

CLICK BACK ON BROWSER TO RETURN TO FOOTNOTE
[1] Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods, Mandarin, 1995.
[2] Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock, Keeper of Genesis, Mandarin, 1996.
[3] P.W. Roberts, River in the Desert: Modern Travels in Ancient Egypt, Random House, NY & Toronto, 1993.
[4] Flinders Petrie. Pyramids and Temples of Egypt. Histories and Myths of Man, Pelham Books, London. 1990.
[5] NBC-TV. Mystery of the Sphinx.
[6] Graham Hancock. From a presentation given during his US book tour, June 1996.