Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology's Greatest Mystery

by Christopher Knight

  He came to believe that the three large pyramids on the Giza Plateau were not built in isolation, as were many temples and smaller pyramids surrounding the three significant structures. Walking down what was originally a ceremonial path from the pyramids to where the Nile waters once used to lap one encounters the Great Sphinx – surely one of the most enigmatic and unusual structures ever created. The Sphinx looked out due east across the Nile whilst a line drawn northeast from the Giza pyramids leads, some 8km away, to the site of the ancient city of Lunu, known in the Bible as On, or Heliopolis to the Greeks. This centre of solar worship is now completely lost beneath the urban sprawl of Cairo.

  Bauval was troubled by the fact that the Giza pyramids are not quite in a straight line (see figure 2) and it was the discrepancy regarding the positioning of the third pyramid that caused him to sit up and make a mental connection. The three pyramids create a pattern that is uncannily like that formed by three of the most famous stars known to humanity throughout its long history – Orion’s Belt.

  Best viewed in Western Europe in the winter months, the constellation of Orion contains some of the most significant stars to be seen in our night skies. Amongst these is Sirius, the brightest object we can see apart from the Sun, Moon and some of the solar system’s planets. Higher in the sky than Sirius, and rising well before it, are the three stars known as Orion’s Belt.

  These stars – Mintaka, Alnilam and Alnitak – are all bright and very conspicuous to anyone viewing the sky. They have been known to every civilization, and by a wealth of names. Some peoples have called them a string of pearls, three beautiful maidens or, in the case of Greek sky watchers, the belt of the great hero and hunter Orion. But everyone who looked at Orion’s Belt could not fail to realize that they point towards the rising of Sirius, which is the greatest star of them all and cannot be mistaken for any other. Follow the three stars of Orion’s Belt down towards the horizon and you are bound to come upon the silver-white orb of Sirius, which has probably been venerated by humanity since our forebears first lifted their heads to admire the heavens.

  Figure 2. Giza pyramids showing offset

  There are many instances of groups of three stars forming a discernable shape in the night sky, which is not so surprising considering just how many stars there are to be seen. But Orion’s Belt is special, not only in its clarity and brightness, but because of its distinctive shape. A glance at figure 3 shows immediately that there is a slight ‘dogleg’ to the alignment of these three stars. It was this small deviation from a straight line that alerted Robert Bauval to a possible association between the three pyramids on the Giza Plateau and the stars of Orion’s Belt.

  Figure 3. Stars of Orion’s Belt showing offset

  All of this took place some time ago. Bauval and his colleague Adrian Gilbert wrote The Orion Mystery, which was published in 1994, following ten years of research by Bauval. The sophisticated astronomical computer programs available to our own research were in their infancy when Bauval first outlined his theory regarding Orion’s Belt. Nevertheless he took an image of the three stars and superimposed it onto an aerial view of the Giza pyramids. We have done the same thing many times and the result can be seen in figure 4.

  The fit is amazingly good considering how small the stars of Orion’s Belt actually are in the sky. We have to bear in mind that we are dealing here with naked-eye astronomy but nevertheless the distance apart of the three stars, and the dogleg they form, are more than adequately represented by the three pyramids of the Giza Plateau. Could it be, Bauval quite reasonably asked himself, that the ancient Egyptians had deliberately created the Giza complex to represent a part of the sky that was so familiar to them?

  In order to substantiate what became a realistic theory Bauval called upon his knowledge of Egyptology and in particular the Pyramid Texts.3 He pointed out how this particular part of the sky had been of great importance to the pyramid builders. The Egyptian kings had believed that after death they were translated to the stars. The fact is mentioned repeatedly in the famed Egyptian Book of the Dead, a series of funerary texts assembled during the New Kingdom – a period that includes the time when Moses was a general in the Egyptian army. Whilst this was around a millennium after the building of the pyramids, it seems almost certain that the Egyptian Book of the Dead itself related back to those ancient Pyramid Texts to be found at Saqqara. The Pyramid Texts represent a series of ‘prayers’ or ‘rituals’ that were considered necessary for the dead king or courtier to enjoy an afterlife.

  Figure 4. Orion’s Belt superimposed onto the Giza pyramids

  Bauval came to realize that the constellation of Orion, and in particular the three stars of Orion’s Belt, had been considered especially important since it was to this part of the sky that one of the most famous Egyptian gods, Osiris, had gone after his own death. Osiris was almost certainly venerated long before dynastic Egypt began to develop. To the ancient Egyptians Osiris was humanity’s best ally. Through a long and complex pre-mythology this important deity gradually came to be considered the most significant god of ‘life’, as opposed to other deities such as Anubis, whose credentials associated them more with ‘death’ – a subject that appears to have obsessed the ancient Egyptians.

  Osiris was more than a god of life – he was ‘the’ god of rebirth. Stories relating to Osiris during his own life reflect his association with rebirth. In the most famous of these he was murdered by the evil god Set but was brought back to life by his faithful and loving wife Isis. After this he took his place in heaven but it was always considered that, in some magical way, successive Pharaohs actually became ‘Osiris on Earth’ during their lives and for the duration of their reign. After death the correct funereal rites ensured that these same Pharaohs would unite with Osiris in heaven. And the place where the Pharaohs would enjoy their afterlife, subsumed by the figure of Osiris, was in that exact place in the sky where Orion’s Belt could be seen.

  Bauval came to believe that it wasn’t merely Orion’s Belt that had been replicated on the sands of Egypt. He arrived at the conclusion that other pyramids represented different stars in the constellation of Orion. Such a notion was beyond the scope of our current researches, however, because we had come to Egypt with the three major pyramids of the Giza Plateau in mind.

  Despite its obvious merits, Bauval’s theory has not been widely accepted in mainstream Egyptology. Like most academic disciplines Egyptology has its canon to protect, and radically new ideas are rarely acknowledged, much less objectively evaluated – especially when they come from a non-academic.

  One of reasons often given for not taking Bauval’s claims seriously is the argument that the ancient Egyptians did not develop any sophisticated astronomical awareness until much later in their development. Experts have never previously found anything that leads them to the conclusion that the pyramid builders knew much about the stars at all. One leading figure spoke for many Egyptologists when he said of the calendar system of 360 days:

  …the simplicity of the Egyptian calendar is a sign of its primitivity; it is the remainder of the prehistoric crudeness, preserved without change by the Egyptian… it seems to me, that every theory of the origin of the Egyptian calendar which assumes an astronomical foundation is doomed to failure.4

  There is absolutely no doubt that this observation made by Otto Neugebauer is a well-founded conclusion based on many years of high-quality research. But in Neugebauer’s day there was no ‘Orion correlation theory’ to muddy the waters.

  We looked to see if there was any evidence of greater sophistication of astronomy in the ancient Egyptians’ ability to measure smaller units of time rather than just days of the year. The evidence is that the ancient Egyptians measured the passage of time by means of star clocks, which divided the transiting heavens into groups of stars that marked out hours – known as decans. The title of imy wnwt or ‘hour-watcher’ was in use right up to the Ptolemaic period when Egypt was ruled by the family of a Macedonian general fr
om the army of Alexander the Great in the 3rd century BC.

  However, this timekeeping by the stars looks as though it was, at later dates, little more than a memory of technique that had been introduced and forgotten a long time in the past. One Egyptologist makes the point well when he argues that knowledge of timekeeping seems to have occurred during a relatively brief period of the country’s history:

  …while we have lists of decans on various astronomical ceilings or other monuments to the end of Egyptian history, we have nothing at all approaching a star clock in form after the time of Merneptah (1223–1211 BC) and that that was a purely funerary relic is indicated by the fact that its arrangement of stars is 600 years earlier into the twelfth dynasty.5

  This indicates a regression in the ability to understand and monitor passing time. Apparently, knowledge of methods of timekeeping had been lost around one and a half millennia before the time of Queen Cleopatra.

  The whole feeling we take from looking at timekeeping in ancient Egypt is that it was not an indigenous skill. It appears to have been an overlay on their worldview – from some minority group or, more likely, from an external influence. Accurate timekeeping is an essential element of successful and detailed astronomy.

  As a discipline, modern archaeology has become extremely good at producing information and building frameworks of understanding regarding past cultures. Some of the techniques available today are simply astonishing – such as the ability to trace the lifetime movements of individuals from fragmentary bodily remains through analysis of their mineral intake during the time they lived, sometimes many thousands of years ago. Where the discipline is, in our opinion, sometimes wanting is in the ability to consider a bigger picture and to deal rigorously with apparent paradox. Whilst this may sound disrespectful, it is not intended to be. Undoubtedly it is easy to spot weaknesses when one does not have to sign up to the convention of procedure that has to be the adopted to provide a framework of ground rules that govern required behaviour.

  But, as the saying goes, all progress is due to the unreasonable person. Quite simply, it is sensible and reasonable to cooperate with the status quo – but any leap forward in understanding is likely to come from the individual who has the audacity to say, ‘we could look at this very differently.’

  If there is good evidence that fourth-dynasty Egyptians were not good astronomers, does it mean that any potential new evidence conflicting with that conclusion must automatically be assumed to be false? Why not suspend judgement and seek out scenarios that could allow both conclusions to coexist? Maybe there was a small group of architect-priests who were expert in understanding the stars and who were also good at measuring the passage of time but who had no opportunity of influencing the established calendar system. Or could a group of previously unidentified outsiders have been brought in to provide astronomical expertise? Certainly, the principle of Occam’s Razor – which logically objects to the invention of unnecessary components in the search for a solution to any question – would preclude such speculation. But what if there are known entities that could influence the situation concerned – if only they were considered?

  Unfortunately the modern convention (and it is no more that an arbitrary adoption) that insists on a silo structure of historical analysis rejects cross-cultural investigation unless there is obvious and repeated artefact-based evidence to demonstrate a connection. As a consequence, sensible questions sometimes go unasked, let alone answered. Valuable evidence is consigned to the waste bin because standing assumptions are considered too important to be challenged. This cosy complacency explains why so many breakthroughs in academia come from people outside the discipline concerned or from mavericks within the subject area who are brave enough to challenge their more conservative peers.

  A perfect example of an outsider breaking the mould, but being ignored by the academic establishment, is the late Alexander Thom. He was a distinguished professor of engineering at Oxford University who, over 50 years of detailed surveying, discovered that the megalithic builders of the British Isles had been using a very finely defined set of standard units of measurement. This breakthrough in our understanding of the Neolithic period is central to our own research and we will return to Thom’s work in the next chapter, but suffice to say at this point his findings were almost universally rejected by mainstream archaeology.

  An example of a ‘maverick’ – whose discoveries are also important to our own investigations, is the late Livio Stecchini. As a professor of metrology (the science of measurement), he argued that the metric system of measurement, as devised by the French in the late 18th century, had been used in an almost identical form 4,500 years earlier in the land of Sumer. Despite his previously high standing in the academic community he was largely ostracized by his peers.

  Robert Bauval belongs (like ourselves) to a third category of people who are largely ignored by the establishment, namely non-academics. The definition of an academic is someone who has been trained in a given discipline and is subsequently employed by a university to teach and possibly conduct research in that subject. They are expected to work procedurally, to apply scientific testing to their logic and to comply with conventional protocol. This includes the process of peer review prior to the possible publication of new information in academic journals.

  Bauval is an engineer with a Master’s degree in marketing. This demonstrates that he knows how to process information and comply with the conventions of a postgraduate education. But to the world of academia, he is not a member and therefore is not a peer – so he cannot be reviewed and therefore his work cannot be directly published by any of the archaeological journals.

  So, if we put the ‘establishment’ view that the ancient Egyptians were not very skilled at astronomy to one side we can, for the moment, accept the evidence of the stellar-aligned pyramid shafts and the possibility of the Giza trio being a deliberate model of the stars of Orion’s Belt. The next question to ask is: where could the star-based ideas and beliefs behind the culture that built the pyramids have come from?

  We have to admit a bias in asking this question because our interest in the pyramids was initiated by a finding that would answer this question. At this stage of our researches we strongly suspected a connection between Neolithic Britain and ancient Egypt – but, assuming that we were right, we did not know whether the Egyptians influenced the Britons or vice versa. We needed to find out more about the origins of the Egyptian culture. Whilst we had a hypothesis to investigate we remained entirely open to what we might find, and open to changing our minds – as we have had to do on many occasions.

  The First Time

  To gain an insight into the thinking behind the creation of structures as special as the Giza pyramids it is essential to understand the theological and mythological heritage of a civilization. As they say, ‘there is little new under the Sun.’ New religions are hardly ever invented – rather they are improvements on older cults or an amalgam of the best bits of the rituals and beliefs from various sources.

  It is from the ancient Egyptians and the Sumerians that the later gods of the Greeks, Romans and the Jews ultimately sprang. Later, Christianity and Islam arrived as reworked versions of older ideas. Abraham, the pivotal figure from the earliest annals of the Old Testament, was from the Sumerian city of Ur and went into Egypt talking about his ‘God of our Fathers’ – meaning that the deity was the god of that specific city. Meanwhile Judaism claims to date back to Abraham and his son Isaac, and the Old Testament carries other Sumerian legends such as Noah’s Flood and the story of Enoch.

  When the story of Jesus Christ was found to be valuable to the Roman state it was changed to include the key aspects of Mithraism, a cult of Persian origin, which was already very popular in Rome and the wider empire. St Paul had been brought up as a follower of Mithra and the idea of the death and resurrection of a man-deity made immediate sense to him, whereas the Jews of the Jerusalem Church must have been horrified by this alien concept bein
g grafted onto their heritage. For them the long-anticipated Messiah was a king to lead them into battle against oppressors – not some physical aspect of their God, Yahweh, who would take responsibility for their individual wrongdoings.6 The powerful icon of the dying and rising god stems back to ancient Egypt and, no doubt, long before that. And the main festivals of Christianity, including Christmas and Easter, were thousands of years old when Jesus Christ was born. Ancient astronomy lies behind these modern religious celebrations – Christmas being the winter solstice, when the rising Sun reaches its most southerly point on the horizon and Easter, the springtime of rebirth, is calculated by the Western Church as being the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox.

  So what influences did the ancient Egyptians have to form their early beliefs? This is difficult because writing was only invented around the time that the Egypt we call ancient Egypt was created by the unification of Upper (southern) and Lower (northern) Egypt, which is thought to have taken place around 3100 BC during dynasty ‘Zero’. One of the earliest hieroglyphic inscriptions is the Narmer Palette, which dates from about that time. It is thought by some to depict the unification of the two lands by King Narmer. On one side of the palette the king is depicted with the white crown of Upper Egypt and the other side depicts him wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt.

  The indications are that the time before history began in Egypt, agriculture had developed around the Nile by the so-called ‘Badarian’ people. They were essentially semi-nomads who appear to have had a belief in the afterlife as they buried their dead in small cemeteries on the outskirts of their temporary settlements. Bodies were interred in the foetal position and they were always laid facing west, towards the setting Sun.

  Archaeologists have been able to track subtle changes in the habits and lifestyles of the Badarian people which started to take place around 4500 BC. The culture in Upper Egypt from this period is referred to as Naqada 1, after the town of Naqada on the west bank of the Nile in the region of Qena. The Naqada people would prove to be the most significant culture to emerge in Upper Egypt. Instead of simply accepting the bounty of the annual Nile flood the Naqada embraced it, building irrigation ditches and canals and creating a form of agriculture that was far more sophisticated that that practised during the Badarian period. The nomadic lifestyle ceased and true towns began to emerge, which opened the door for trade and a diversification of skills.