Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology's Greatest Mystery

by Christopher Knight

  Chapter 10

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  REVELATION IN ROME

  Hall of All the Gods

  At the end of February 2009 we set off to Rome where we were due to give a talk at a conference on new developments in Egyptology. It was an early start, but we were picked up at the airport by a driver and dropped at our hotel before 10 o’clock, and 30 minutes later we were outside a building which both of us had quite separately identified as the greatest structure of the Roman period. The Pantheon, or ‘place of all gods’, is in the heart of this beautiful city and it leaves all others, from St Peter’s to the Coliseum, trailing a long way behind for beauty, engineering and sheer visual impact.

  It was built early in the 2nd century AD by Hadrian, to replace an earlier structure destroyed in AD 80. This earlier Pantheon had been lost in a great fire, believed to have been started by proto-Christian Jews seeking revenge for the killing of James, the brother of Jesus, and subsequently destroying the entire city of Jerusalem in AD 70.

  Behind its façade of Corinthian pillars lies a gigantic concrete domed hall that is 43.3 m (142 ft) in diameter, and the same in height to the open circle at its highest point. The 5,000-tonne dome still holds the record for the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.

  Without doubt Rome is a fabulous city. Despite having many structures destroyed in the 7th century it remains tremendously unspoilt, and is still a relatively small city that can be fully walked well within a day. We realize that for many visitors, especially from the New World, this must seem an ancient place. Thoughts of dramatic events from the remote past excite the mind. It was here that Julius Caesar entertained his lover, Cleopatra, the beautiful Hellenistic Pharaoh of the Egyptians. Here the emperor met his death at the hands of assassins. His ally Mark Anthony eventually travelled to Egypt where he also began a liaison with Cleo-patra. Caesar’s child by Cleopatra was strangled and never saw Rome. All ancient high drama.

  Whilst the city is old and associated with power and strife in equal measures, it does not seem so ancient in our scale of measure. Remember that the city did not come into existence until some 3,000 years after the Thornborough henges were first constructed. So the days of the Roman Empire are much closer in time to us today than they are to the Neolithic structures that stand across the landscape of the British Isles.

  It was, of course, Julius Caesar who conducted the first Roman invasion of Britain in 55 BC, and according to the woefully under-informed purveyors of ‘standard’ history, they met a bunch of primitive tribesmen who painted themselves blue. They did bring quite a lot of new ideas with them, but not all of them were quite as original as the invaders believed. The straight roads were already here, and even flushable toilets have been found in 5,000-year-old settlements such as the apparent college at Skara Brae in Orkney. And even when they eventually brought their new cult of Romanized Christianity, the locals told them that they had known of this dying and resurrecting god for 1,000 years.

  As we meandered around Rome’s narrow streets and spacious squares, we began to discuss the challenge of fitting in the key points of our recent findings into a relatively short talk to people who would be unfamiliar with the British Neolithic period. However, when we gave our talk the next day it went down extraordinarily well, despite the difficulties of translation. Kind as they were, it was not the audience that made this trip an unexpected success – it was two fellow contributors that we had met at dinner the previous evening, both of whom had just flown in from different sides of the USA.

  The Sphinx and the Flood

  One of the speakers was Robert Schoch, a geologist from Boston University, who was accompanied by his delightful ballerina wife Kate. Robert is a hard-nosed academic with an open mind. He spoke eloquently and convincingly about the dating of the Great Sphinx (on the Giza Plateau) by means of water erosion. He pointed out that, whilst much of the Sphinx has either been overcut or repaired across the millennia, the original workings can be dated by the excavated pit which was cut out of bedrock around the first monument. The walls of the cut-out rock face show that the base was lowered in relatively recent times, but the main part of the digging was completed before a long and sustained massive flooding took place. Consequently, he puts the original Sphinx as being more than double the age of the pyramids that stand above and behind it on the Giza Plateau.

  He explained that geological evidence of ancient comet impacts is changing, or should be changing the way we view the past. The idea of these cataclysmic events occurring with some relative frequency is now becoming widely accepted within geology, as having brought catastrophe to the world with terrifying frequency over the period that humankind has existed on the planet. Such impacts on the oceans understandably create mega-tsunamis that drive deep into continental landmass and cause monsoon rains to fall for perhaps decades.

  According to Schoch, the features of the rock around the rear and sides of the Sphinx can only have been caused by massive and sustained water flow, such as would occur after a comet impact.

  In 1999 Chris wrote Uriel’s Machine with Robert Lomas, describing the geological case and the anthropological evidence that the biblical Flood had caused a major global catastrophe. Whilst Chris’ argument had begun with evidence published by leading geologists, it was good to hear detailed confirmation that this did indeed occur. Although, it would be preferable to be wrong – because according to the previous intervals of such horrible events, we are more than due for another impact. Then we will know what ‘climate change’ can really mean. Several years ago Chris was flying from Dallas to San Francisco, and he noticed that there was a white circle in every major hollow in the desert below him, which made him look further north and think of the salt flats of Utah. If there had been a massive flood here (and a major comet fragment hit off the coast of Mexico) this area would have had a super-giant tsunami ripping across the landscape. As it lost momentum and ran back to the sea it would, logically, have left huge pools of seawater trapped in low-lying areas.

  Could those circles be sea salt and could the salt flats be the residue of a seawater incursion?

  Upon returning to England, Chris found that the answer was ‘yes’ and ‘yes’. It is known that 10,000 years ago, in what is now the US state of Utah, humans fished freshwater lakes in a pleasant green landscape, and then suddenly it changed. And the salt is not any old salt, it is clearly sea salt – containing all of the various minerals (including traces of gold) that the oceans possess.

  This part of North America was devastated by a comet impact, and old Native American stories tell of the survivors on high ground watching a wall of sea hurtling towards them.1 So too was North Africa. The plains that were once full of lakes, foliage and animal life were overtaken by heat and became the Sahara Desert. Another speaker at the Rome conference, Mahmoud Marei, has conducted expeditions deep into the Sahara and found cave paintings depicting a green landscape with giraffes.

  The world can and does change rapidly and, for humans, unpleasantly.

  The Ancient Astrophysicists

  The most startling new evidence came from a third speaker at the conference: Thomas Brophy, an astrophysicist who has worked with the NASA Voyager Project, the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and the Japanese Space program.

  In conducting our own researches we have found that the megalithic system and the so-called metric system were used in conjunction during the fourth millennium BC. However, we had concluded that it was unlikely that we were looking at a resurrection or revival, rather than a genesis, for these complex concepts. It seemed to us that there must have been some much more advanced progenitor culture somewhere in the distant past. And here, in Rome, we were hearing new ideas that could represent a major missing piece of the jigsaw we were attempting to put together.

  Brophy explained how he has become involved in the investigation of a group of megalithic sites, deep in the Sahara in southern Egypt, known as Nabta: a structure we knew of but had little or no i
nformation about. This extremely remote location is a place that neither humans nor anything else much ever visit. It is on the Tropic of Cancer and is made up of a number of standing stones – some in the form of a circle. But even more interesting is what lies beneath this ancient surface feature.

  Below the sands of the Sahara lies another, far older structure – in fact a structure which long predates the desertification of this huge swathe of North Africa. And its properties are, if Brophy is to be believed, utterly mind-bending. He calls it ‘The Origin Map’.

  As Robert Schoch put it, Brophy’s work creates three distinct levels of problem to confront. The first one is not too academically controversial, the second is very challenging, and the third will have conventional archaeologists reaching for a gun. There are three basic levels of knowledge that the ancient builders at this site had, as, inferred by Brophy’s findings,2 various artefacts at Nabta indicate:

  1. Maps and markers denoting objects, alignments, and events that can be observed in the sky with the unaided (naked) eye.

  2. Markers indicating celestial phenomena and events that cannot be observed (apparently) with the unaided eye.

  3. Detailed astronomical and cosmological information, such as the distances to stars, the speeds at which stars are moving away from the Earth, the structure of our galaxy (the Milky Way), and information on the origin of the universe, which we have either only just discovered in modern times, or possibly information (for example, that concerning planetary systems around stars) which we do not even have available to us at the moment.

  Heavy claims indeed! But, apart from the convention for believing that we are the smartest dudes ever to walk the Earth, there is absolutely no reason why even the third level cannot be true. Archaeologists cannot even express an informed opinion, as this is new territory for them.

  A particularly interesting aspect of Brophy’s work is the interest these people had in the stars of Orion’s Belt and an understanding of the three-dimensional space between the three stars. It is also interesting to note that it has recently been discovered that a region within the constellation of Orion is the nearest ‘star factory’ to Earth – a place where stars are being manufactured at a considerable rate.

  Brophy argues that the relative distances of Mintaka, Alnitak and Alnilam, as well as their velocity away from us, is recorded in this ancient astronomical observatory. And Brophy claims to know just how old the structure beneath the Sahara actually is – because its builders dated it!

  It is an incredible 18,000 years old. That is long before the end of the last Ice Age.

  This was identifiable because of the precession of the equinoxes (see Chapter 5) the 26,000-year wobble that changes the position of stars relative to the horizon and the Sun.

  It is of note that Brophy points out that the stars of Orion’s Belt, as represented in the Nabta circle, are shown as it appeared on the meridian, which is an imaginary line in the sky that runs directly overhead from north to south and bisects the sky, at the summer solstice. This puts the circle (on top of the desert sands) at a date between 6400 BC and 4900 BC, and accords with the findings of the team led by Fred Wendorf that discovered Nabta. However, other parts of the circle are, according to Brophy, clearly aligned to 16,500 years BC. Robert Schock said of this:

  This is a date of such antiquity that debunkers, and hardcore conventional academics will immediately stop reading, but Brophy makes a compelling case that this is in fact what the stones represent.

  Of course, given the dismissal of the findings of Alexander Thom, how much worse can it be for Thomas Brophy – an astrophysicist who would overturn the cosy standard story of the past, who would open the door to our theories having to be seriously considered?

  But Brophy knows a thing or two about statistics. He has calculated the chances of all this being accidental. He says of just one set of stones:

  The probability that these stars aligned with the megaliths by random chance can be estimated according to the method developed by Schaefer (1986) … The more conservative of the range of estimates gives random chance probability of these seven stars aligning with the megaliths according to this system of less than 2 chances in a million. That is more that a thousand times as certain as the usual 3 standard deviations required for accepting a scientific hypothesis as valid. The more liberal of the range of estimates gives a random probability of about one in ten to the thirteenth power, or about as likely as picking at random the same human being out of all people on Earth twice in a row. By even the more conservative estimate, these are by far the most certain ancient megalithic astronomical alignments of any known in the world.

  Game, set and match?

  We doubt it. As some academics will quietly agree, many will not like the possible outcome. Science and religion are far closer bedfellows than most people imagine.

  A man who is considered something of a maverick Egyptologist – John Anthony West – has written the Afterword of Brophy’s book. Here he takes a view on how Brophy can expect to be received by the chieftains of the tribe:

  In one sense Brophy’s work will seem radical; revolutionary. Yet in another it can be seen as just the latest (admittedly most dramatic) contribution to a reappraisal of ancient history that has been lurching along by fits and starts for more than a century – over the raucous, concerted opposition of the entire community of archaeologists, historians, Egyptologists, anthropologists and all the other academic disciplines devoted to studying the past.

  So what is in store for The Origin Map? Given the reception accorded far less radical ideas, the reaction to Brophy’s claims may be anticipated with some certainty.

  There are few things in this world more predictable than the reaction of conventional minds to unconventional ideas. The reaction is always and invariably some combination of contempt, outrage, abuse and derision. As a common corollary, the level of outrage expressed is proportionate to both the quality of the supporting evidence and the magnitude of the challenge posed by the new idea – the better the evidence, the more radical the idea, the louder and shriller the response.3

  Beautifully put, Mr West. And subsequent events have proven you correct.

  As we returned from Rome we once again discussed the apparent impossibility of the Neolithic people having actually devised the wonderful system of measurements and geometry which they had self-evidently used. Could it be that the knowledge we had come across, and that had been used to build the pyramids, had originally come from Egypt anyway?

  We could not know the answer – not yet and maybe we never will. But we now felt more confident than ever that we had found some very important parts of the puzzle. And if people like Thomas Brophy are prepared to publish and be damned, there is a good chance that between us we will eventually have a clear picture of the real past.

  Chapter 11

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  CELTS, DRUIDS AND FREEMASONRY

  The Myth of the Celts

  Despite being extremely busy with our various trips around Europe and beyond, and all the astronomical deskwork we were undertaking, there was one strand of our investigations we were conscious had been left unattended. We would never have recognized the importance of any of the British henges in the first place, had it not been for the chance encounter with the ancient British city of Bath and an extraordinary architect called John Wood.

  Wood’s most famous structure, the King’s Circus in Bath, with its 366-MY circumference, had led us to look first at Stonehenge and then at the giant henges elsewhere in Britain. Of course it was entirely possible that the whole thing came about as a tremendous coincidence. John Wood simply copied the dimensions of the original henge at Stonehenge when he planned the King’s Circus and, by so doing, without any knowledge of megalithic measures he provided the clue we needed to set us on a course of discovery. Indeed, had John Wood been just another genius of the 18th century, of which there were many in Regency Britain, we may have looked no further. However, bearing in mind his esot
eric credentials and his fascination for ancient history, we could not absolutely dismiss from our minds the possibility that John Wood knew very well that the dimensions of the King’s Circus were extremely important. To discover the truth we would have to know much more about Wood himself, and about the city of Bath.

  John Wood, the man who planned and built some of the most important parts of Regency Bath, was born in Yorkshire in 1704, though his family heritage was from Bath, where he would return as a full-blown architect and town planner in 1727. From an early age he had shown an interest in art and architecture, and he cut his teeth on several commissions in London. As he grew and matured he met some influential people and somewhere along the line he developed what can only be described as an obsession for British history and, in particular, Druidism.

  Archaeology was in its infancy, and history was rather misunderstood in Wood’s 18th-century Britain. The general view of Britain’s ancient past was confused and often plain wrong. Roman writings from the days of Empire had described the fierce warrior-priests of people they called Celts, referred to by Julius Caesar in particular as ‘Druidi’. Gentlemen scholars of the 18th century came to suppose that any prehistoric religion or culture associated with Britain must have owed something to these strange and enigmatic characters described by the Roman invaders of long ago.