Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology's Greatest Mystery

by Christopher Knight

  ‘Remember Alphard,’ said Chris ‘Back then it rose and set east–west at every point that these people could view it – no matter what their latitude or longitude.’

  ‘But only for a hundred years or so,’ Alan replied.

  ‘Quite long enough to lay out a grid system across these islands if they had wanted to,’ replied Chris. ‘Imagine the scenario. The master astronomer from Thornborough sends out a team to the Lincoln hill, which they knew was exactly 1 degree south. They then build a pile of dry timber ready for a bonfire at Thornborough and at Lincoln – and at say 5-km intervals in between. Each timber pile is screened with two sets of sewn animal skins – one covering the view to the north and the other to the south.’

  Alan was busy drawing the proposed set-up on his pad. Meanwhile, Chris continued.

  ‘The Lincoln team are armed with a pendulum to measure time – either in Megalithic Seconds or, more likely, modern seconds. Whilst the team at Lincoln are 127 km away as the crow flies, they are further east by about 66 km in terms of longitude from Thornborough. That means they will see Alphard first by several minutes.’

  ‘Yes,’ Alan replied. ‘Just give me a moment …’

  The Skype call went quiet briefly whilst Alan performed a quick calculation on his astronomical software. ‘Nearly there!’ he said and then there was another pause. ‘Chris,’ said Alan after a moment, ‘it’s exactly 4 minutes – and I mean 4 minutes, not 3 minutes 59 seconds or 4 minutes 1 second – exactly 4 minutes!’

  An almost frantic conversation followed as we discussed the implications. The significance of 4 minutes was not lost on either of us. In a mean solar day, 4 minutes is the amount of time it takes the Earth to turn on its axis by 1 modern degree of arc.

  The southern Thornborough henge and the Lincoln mount are precisely one Megalithic Degree apart north to south, and one modern degree east to west!

  For years we had held on to a common hunch that the Megalithic 366-degree system of geometry and the 360-degree geometry we use today had once been used in tandem – and here was a confirmation of the fact. It looked almost certain that the Megalithic 366 system had been used to measure longitude and the 360 system to measure latitude.

  We were stunned. Not many readers will immediately grasp the sheer magnitude of this result. This finding has massive implications and it delivers a coup de grace to the archaeological establishment who are doing their best to ignore the existence of Neolithic metrology. For the Thornborough henges to point at the Lincoln mount across the flattest 127 km in the UK and then to find that the two are exactly 1 Megalithic Degree (366 × 60 × 6 MY) apart by latitude and 1 modern degree apart by longitude is beyond any conceivable chance of coincidence.

  We had long discussed the thought that the Megalithic Yard and its associated 366-degree system represented the night (stellar based), and the metre/second and 360-degree system was of the day (solar based). Here was a first indication, a powerful indication that we were right.

  Everywhere we look we are blessed (or maybe sometimes cursed) by major new discoveries, all of which deserve someone embarking on a doctorate to concentrate on them specifically. In a conversation lasting, so far, less than a couple of minutes, we had identified another.

  Of course only Alphard would provide the henge builders with the ultimate tool they needed because of its east/west behaviour for that short period of time.

  This important discovery had, quite naturally, hijacked the conversation, but after an hour or so Chris returned to his original thoughts about how these amazing Neolithic astronomers had achieved such accuracy. ‘How they did all this is really clever,’ said Chris. ‘Using a fire arrangement, such as Jim has suggested, the process almost certainly worked like this: Shortly before Alphard was due to rise, everyone in the chain stokes up their masked fires. Being further east, the team at Lincoln see Alphard rise first and they then immediately drop their screen facing north – and at the same they time start a pendulum swinging and count the beats. As the next team along the line see the light of the Lincoln fire they drop their northern screen, and so on along the chain until the relayed signal reaches Thornborough. The Thornborough team immediately drop the screen facing back towards Lincoln.’

  Alan could see what was coming. ‘Wow – I see where you’re heading.’

  ‘Yes, as Jim has suggested – the message goes back along the line as each station drops their opposite screen for a few seconds. Once the signal is received at Lincoln they note how many beats have passed at that point. But they still keep the pendulum going.’ Alan’s drawing was getting quite busy on his notepad.

  Chris continued. ‘The split-second that the Thornborough team see Alphard rise they send a second flash from their beacon fire. When this is relayed to Lincoln the team there stop counting. Now for the really clever bit that Jim came up with. The two teams are 127 km away from each other – how quickly do you think they could compare notes on their timings of Alphard rising, and how accurate in terms of pendulum beats do you think they could be in measuring the difference?’

  Alan paused before answering. ‘I was going to say that the Lincoln team would have to send a person back to Thornborough with their information but they must have been able to use the fire signals in some way to communicate. And somehow, as we have just found out, they were spot-on accurate.’

  ‘You’re right. They were accurate to within a single beat and the entire communication took seconds not hours or even days.’

  ‘What?’ said Alan. ‘That speed is incredible!’

  ‘It certainly is. I doubt we could improve on it today using mobile phones. The trick was that they had designed into their experiment a brilliant correction method to compensate for the inevitable time delay in signalling. When the first signal came back from Thornborough to confirm receipt of the original signal from Lincoln, the team noted how long it took – say 22 beats, i.e. 22 seconds. They then halved that to 11 seconds as the known time it took for the message to transmit one-way between the two locations.’

  ‘So, hold on there a moment,’ said Alan, as he made some further calculations. ‘When the team at Lincoln see the second signal flash …’ He paused briefly ‘… they would have counted 251 beats since they first saw Alphard then deduct the 11 beats taken by the signal fires and they know they are 240 seconds east of Thornborough. And because they knew that Alphard is visible in winter for half of the Earth’s turn they could quickly calculate the precise distance east.’

  ‘We cannot know for sure that they actually did it this way,’ Chris admitted. ‘But given that there now can be no doubt that they did measure the Earth and understood the concepts of latitude and longitude, they must have used a technique like this.’

  ‘One other thought,’ said Alan. ‘The team at Lincoln could also have informed the Thornborough lot about the result of the experiment pretty quickly by using the fire transmission method – long fire exposures to indicate minutes and short flashes for the seconds. But we now know that they only needed four long flashes – if they used minutes of time like we do today, which seems highly likely. It looks like the Sumerians must have learned of these units from the people of Britain.’

  What we could see was a culture that understood a great deal about how the heavens worked – the stars, the Moon, the Sun, the Earth and probably the planets. Most importantly, they clearly understood how to map the heavens down onto the Earth – with stunning accuracy. They had produced a perfect and gigantic copy of the stars of Orion’s Belt and their apparent version of Sirius 10,000 m away. And that had apparently been planned at another henge hundreds of kilometres away in Oxfordshire.

  Who were these people? All of the evidence points to an integrated powerbase; an astronomer-priesthood who planned structures across thousands of square miles and many centuries. The standard archaeological establishment idea that henges were locally conceived places of worship to unknown deities is dead in the water. These people were, first and foremost, astronomers; thei
r understanding of the heavens may well have had a theological component, but giant circles on the face of the Earth were scientific instruments, not proto-churches!

  We wonder what archaeologists of the distant future will make of the huge underground structures at CERN, which is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. The Large Hadron Collider is a 27 km-circumference circular tunnel buried 100 m beneath the Franco-Swiss border. Stripped of its hardware the empty structure could be anything – so it must be a tomb or a place of worship for underworld deities?

  In actual fact this rather plain circular structure is a super-scientific instrument serviced by 2,600 locally-based people for the benefit of 7,931 scientists from 580 universities across 80 countries. Amongst the many achievements made at this circular hole is an invention made by Sir Tim Burners-Lee – the internet. And current research is designed to facilitate time travel; albeit only for subatomic particles.

  The CERN analogy with Thornborough and other henges across Britain may not be as far-fetched as one might imagine. Could both have been created for the benefit of international scientists? Were the henge creators from the British Isles, or could they have been a broad-based group that came from elsewhere to take advantage of the various astronomical benefits delivered by the latitudes of northwestern Europe?

  At this stage, at least, we do not know. All we can say for certain is that they used units, namely metres and seconds, as well as Megalithic Yards. The evidence, such as it is, paints a picture of a people who could use this technology, but we struggle to believe that they created it. It is simply too advanced.

  Having extracted as much as we can out of the structures in the British Isles for the time being, we moved on. Our attention now turned to that other supposed model of Orion’s Belt far away on the sands of Giza.

  The Giza Connection

  In our own personal libraries we both have a book that dates back to 1994. It is the work we discussed in Chapter 1, namely The Orion Mystery, written by Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert. They describe how they came to conclude that the three pyramids of Giza were a copy of Orion’s Belt. The notion seemed quite reasonable, but neither of us was either a supporter or a detractor. If we had been asked to express a view at the time we would have been a little sceptical, but fully supportive of the need to investigate the idea further. Certainly, the argument had merit, and the objections of some opponents were less than impressive.

  In early 2008, the Giza pyramids and their layout suddenly flashed up mid-screen on our radar. Once we realized that the henges at Thornborough really were created as a representation of Orion’s Belt, the work of Bauval and Gilbert gained a new meaning for us.

  It was not a complete surprise as we had established an apparently inexplicable link between megalithic Britain and ancient Egypt several years earlier. In our first book together, Civilization One, we had found that the two major units of length, the royal cubit and the remen, seemed to come from the pendulum-derived Megalithic Yard.

  We had discovered that a circle with a circumference of one Megalithic Yard had a diameter of one royal cubit. And the remen was the hypotenuse of a square around that circle (see figure 14).

  The circle has a circumference of 1 Meg Yard. The hypotenuse

  of a square around that circle is 1 Egyptian remen.

  Figure 14. The relationship between the Megalithic Yard and the Egyptian remen

  It is for this reason that the Great Pyramid of Khufu appears to have been built using the ratio we know as pi. The concept is a little difficult to explain but let us suggest that the Egyptian priests made a trundle wheel that had a circumference of one Megalithic Yard. Let us now assume that they used this to measure out 279 rotations along the ground for each side of the pyramid. Now instead of using the wheel for the sides of the pyramid, a measurement equivalent to the diameter of the wheel was used 279 times for the pyramid’s height. This being the case, the finished pyramid would be bound to exhibit pi, whether the builders understood it or not.

  Taking Bauval’s theory together with our earlier discoveries of megalithic measures on the Giza Plateau, it seemed as though a careful re-read of The Orion Mystery was necessary. We were not disappointed by what we found.

  One aspect we had not fully appreciated until we re-read the book was how important the river Nile was to the sky picture the Egyptians were apparently trying to create in the desert. When seen from the Earth amongst the backdrop of stars Orion’s Belt lies adjacent to the Milky Way. The Milky Way is the galaxy to which our Sun belongs and the milky white smear across the night sky is created because we are looking sideways into the centre of the galaxy with its millions of stars. Only someone who has seen the sky on a really clear, moonless night, and in a place far from any lights, can truly appreciate its magnificence. Anyone sky-watching under such circumstances could be forgiven for seeing the Milky Way as being similar to a great silver river, snaking away across the sky.

  A central theme of The Orion Mystery is the proximity of the three Giza pyramids to the River Nile. We know from inscriptions in tombs and temples, and from surviving papyrus documents, that the ancient Egyptians often referred to the Milky Way as the ‘Nile in the Sky’. Was it not likely, Bauval and Gilbert asked, that this association had been built into the attempt of the Egyptians to recreate Orion’s Belt on the ground? The idea seemed reasonable to us, and more so now because we realized immediately that a similar state of affairs existed at Thornborough. Looking down from the air it can be seen that the River Ure snakes past to one side of the super-henges – a not dissimilar situation to the one found at Giza with the pyramids and the river Nile. It has to be a possibility that those who laid out the three henges in North Yorkshire were also considering the adjacent river as an earthly representation of the Milky Way.

  The work of Bauval and Gilbert has not been without its critics. One such criticism came from astronomer Ed Krupp of Griffith University Los Angeles. He suggested that the authors of The Orion Mystery were guilty of a deception in that they had ‘turned the map of Egypt upside down’ when demonstrating the similarity between the three major pyramids at Giza and the stars of Orion’s Belt. Robert Bauval in particular strenuously and staunchly defended the position he had taken in The Orion Mystery. He received support for the way he had handled his evidence from astronomers such as Archie Roy, emeritus professor at Glasgow University and Dr Percy Seymour, a South African astronomer and astrophysicist.

  According to Robert Bauval’s theories it isn’t simply the three major pyramids representing Orion’s Belt that demonstrate the cosmological building efforts of the ancient Egyptians. He also sees other stars around Orion’s Belt as being represented by pyramids in locations elsewhere in the Egyptian desert sands. This may well be the case but our initial interest was focused on the three main pyramids at Giza – because of their Orion’s Belt associations and also on account of the megalithic measurements we had found there during the research for our book Civilization One.

  We began to collect the most accurate measurements we could for the pyramids on the Giza Plateau. Clearly the plan of the pyramids was not as large as that of the Thornborough henges, even if the work that went into creating them was significantly greater. The direct measurement from henge A to henge C at Thornborough is 1,500 m, whereas the measurement, centre to centre, between the Great Pyramid (Khufu) and the smallest of the three pyramids (Menkaure) is about 943 m. Searching through as many records and surveys as we could, we came to the conclusion that the gap between the centre of Khufu’s pyramid and the centre pyramid (Khafre) is about 479 m and the gap between the centre pyramid and the southern pyramid of Menkaure is around 463 m.

  Taking this information into account, we quite quickly discovered something that surprised us almost beyond belief. It became quite obvious that the ground plan for the three major pyramids on the Giza Plateau had not been planned in their native Egypt, but thousands of kilometres away – at the triple-henge site of Thornborough in Great Br
itain!

  Chapter 9

  •

  SAILING TO THE STARS

  A Meeting in Spain

  Robert Bauval caused a sensation when, together with Adrian Gilbert, he wrote The Orion Mystery back in 1994, which claimed that the Giza pyramids were planned as a representation of the stars of Orion’s Belt. It seems a reasonable enough claim, given that it is known that these stars were important to the pyramid builders, but virtually since the day it was written Egyptologists have been up in arms to dismiss it in favour of their own pet theories.

  Robert may not walk like an Egyptian, but he certainly thinks like one, being born and brought up in Alexandria to parents of Belgian origin. He is a fluent Arabic speaker and has spent most of his life living and working in the Middle East and Africa as a construction engineer.

  We decided that we needed to share our findings with Robert, who we knew had for some time lived in southern England. However, we soon found that he had left the country, having had the good fortune to sell his house just as the credit-crunch of 2008 hit the Western world. He was obviously missing the warmer climes of his youth in Alexandria as he had now taken an apartment on the Costa del Sol in southern Spain. By some coincidence Robert’s new residence was just a 15-minute drive from a house Chris has as a holiday home, so it was a simple matter to arrange a convenient date and time for a meeting.

  We left England early on a very icy January morning and arrived less than three hours later to the pleasantly warm city of Malaga. Without hold baggage we picked up our hire car without delay and headed out on our 30-km journey down the motorway signposted to Cadiz. After calling at the local supermarket for some essential supplies we were soon sitting by the swimming pool in hot sunshine planning how best to introduce Robert Bauval to our discoveries.