Journeys to the Mythical Past

by Zecharia Sitchin

  2

  PUZZLING CAVITIES, MYSTERIOUS SAND

  As readers of my writings know, it has been my aim to actually visit the places I was writing about; and with the exception of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, I have by and large done so. I have of course been to Egypt and the Sinai peninsula—locations of the pyramids, the Sphinx, and Mount Sinai, of which I wrote in The Stairway to Heaven. Now the eyewitness evidence provided by Mr. Allen prompted me to find a way to also visit the “crime scene”—to get inside the Great Pyramid and the Relieving Chambers where the red paint markings were.

  That, I knew, was then almost as impossible as my other ambition: To obtain a helicopter with which to land on the true Mount Sinai; but I was determined to do it.

  I began the preparations as soon as The Stairway to Heaven was published. Through the Egyptian Ambassador in Washington copies of the book, accompanied by proper letters of recommendation, were sent to President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and other VIPs there. In addition to this political high-level channel, I tried to smooth the way to the necessary permissions on an “operative” (i.e., bureaucratic) level: I became a member of the influential American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), and was personally introduced to Dr. Mohamed Ibrahim Bakr, Chairman of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization that controlled all such matters. With the way to success thus smoothed, I went to Egypt in 1982. In Cairo, some of the VIPs on my list were not there—starting with President Sadat, who had been assassinated the previous October. Of those in town, everyone was nice and hospitable; but none of the high-level connections led anywhere.

  I did not give up. After the attempt in 1982, I found what I thought might be a more practical avenue. As many who have made repeat visits to the Great Pyramid have found out, the actual on-site control is in the hands of the robed guards/guides stationed at the entrance who can let you in when the Pyramid is officially closed, or open for you a locked chamber “by arrangement.” As my luck would have it, the very boss of all the Giza guardians was right here in the USA—completing his graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. His name was Zahi Hawass; his title was Chief Inspector of the Giza Pyramids; and he was giving a lecture at the University Museum (of which I was a member). I attended and introduced myself to the speaker. I told him about my books; he indicated to me his interest in giving lectures, and in finding a publisher for a book that he was writing; I offered to be of help. I also found out there that he was going to lead an “Egypt in Depth” tour in September/October 1984 (fig. 22).

  I not only enrolled myself and my wife in the tour—I also sent Mr. Hawass copies of The 12th Planet and The Stairway to Heaven with a nice letter describing my interest in Egypt’s antiquities. The tour, however, was canceled; so I called Mr. Hawass and told him I was ready to go on my own—if he could arrange for me to go into the Great Pyramid and see the Relieving Chambers. In response, Mr. Hawass provided me with a letter of introduction addressed to “Mr. Ahmed Mousa, Director of Antiquities at the Giza plateau,” asking him to enable the bearer of the letter “to see whatever he wants to see in Giza.”

  Before leaving for Egypt in November 1984, I made a photocopy of the letter for my files (fig. 23); I have kept it all these years as a significant memento, because, as time went on, Dr. Zahi Hawass moved up the antiquities hierarchy to become the virtual dictator in all matters concerning Giza and other Egyptian antiquities—and because our paths were fated to cross again, including on that fateful day in 1997 when I was almost killed inside the Great Pyramid.

  Figure 22

  Figure 23

  I arrived in Giza with the all-important letter to Mr. Ahmed Mousa full of expectations; disappointment was not late in coming . . . Benefiting from experience, I first went to the pyramid’s entrance, to find out what was going on, what can be seen, what can be entered—by private arrangement, if necessary. There was no way to reach the Relieving Chambers, they said; climbable scaffolding needs to be erected for that. I went to the office building that stands on a rise to the right of the pyramid plaza. Mr. Mousa, I was told, was away. His assistant, a Mr. Ibrahim, took the letter and promised I’d be called at my hotel; I knew there was a fat chance for that, so I was back at the Director’s office the next day, waiting and waiting for Mr. Ibrahim to show up. When he did, I was told that they are working on my request, but really there is no way to climb up where I want to go; higher up permissions are needed to set up access; it’ll take time; I have to be patient . . . I spent the day poking in and around the Pyramids and Sphinx; I spent a day in the Egyptian Museum; I hired a driver and went to explore Sakkara. For five days there was no news. I went back to New York.

  Unbeknown to me at the time, my conclusion that the Great Pyramid and its companions in Giza (the two other pyramids and the Sphinx) were thousands of years older than Khufu’s time did not go unnoticed in Virginia Beach, Va., where the Association for Research and Enlightenment has been headquartered. The A.R.E. promotes and teaches the legacy of the famed “Seer” Edgar Cayce, whose wide-ranging “readings” decades earlier included visions of the past. He spoke repeatedly of a lost civilization that preceded the Pharaohs in Egypt, and credited it with building the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx. The date? 10500 B.C.—the very date of my conclusions!

  In 1985 the A.R.E. sent a team to Giza to verify Cayce’s predictive date through newly developed carbon dating techniques. Samples of organic matter (wood, charcoal) that somehow got stuck on the pyramid’s stone blocks were collected and sent for dating to two highly reputable laboratories. The samples from the Great Pyramid were found to range in age from about 2900 B.C. (give or take 100 years) for material collected from its bottom to 3800 B.C. (plus or minus 160 years) for samples from the topmost courses. The dates were far from 10500 B.C., yet they predated Khufu from several centuries to more than twelve hundred years.

  The investigators confirmed that no samples were collected inside the pyramid; all were from the exterior—organic material stuck to the stone blocks when they were exposed. This could happen either before the limestone casing was installed, or after it was ripped off. Because of the dating results, to assume the former required the pyramid to have been built upside down, first the topmost courses (samples dated 3800 B.C.) and then the lower ones (samples dated 2900 B.C.). To assume the latter meant that the limestone casing was already gone centuries before Khufu’s time. I was invited by the A.R.E. for my comments; they were published as a featured cover article in its journal Venture Inward (November/December 1986 issue).

  (The enigma of the disappeared limestone casing stones has never been satisfactorily explained by Egyptologists; the conjecture—that the large, precisely shaped and angled blocks were ripped off for use in local construction—fails to show where the huge number of these blocks had gone; hardly any have been found in Cairo or surrounding villages. The true answer might be that they were destroyed during the “Pyramid Wars,” as described in my book The Wars of Gods and Men.)

  My suggestion that the Giza complex was built circa 10500 B.C. was also getting “celestial corroboration,” in a manner of speaking. As it turned out, two British authors (Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert) were researching at that time their idea that the Giza layout (see fig. 6) emulated the celestial layout of the Orion constellation and its stars. Their problem was that (due to the phenomenon of Precession) the Giza layout seems to emulate the Orion layout as it had been not in Khufu’s time but thousands of years earlier. Not wishing to challenge Egyptological chronology head on, the two authors (in their book The Orion Mystery) said that even if the Pharaohs did build the pyramids, the Giza layout followed a “prior alignment with Orion—in 10490 B.C.”

  But that, as the reader knows, was a time when gods, not men, reigned in Egypt.

  By the mid-1980s the use of advanced technology as an archaeological tool arrived in Egypt. French teams, then Japanese, began to probe the Giza monuments with soil-penetrating radar and other high-tech equipment. They discovered puzzling
“cavities” all over the place—and gave rise to a new set of mysteries.

  In May 1986 a team of two French architects, Gilles Dormion and Jean-Patrice Goidin, were somehow allowed to go into the Great Pyramid with instruments identified as a “gravity meter” and they “discovered previously unknown spaces behind walls eight feet thick in the corridor leading to the so-called Queen’s Chamber,” to quote one of the many press reports; this one, from the Economist of London, contained almost in passing a revelation whose significance loomed larger later on: The high-tech equipment was that used by engineers to detect dangerous structural cracks in nuclear plants.

  The focus of their findings was the Horizontal Passage that leads to the “Queen’s Chamber” from a junction where the Ascending Passage becomes the Grand Gallery (fig. 24). The nature and extent of the voids or “spaces” found behind the western wall of this horizontal passage was unclear, but speculation quickly arose that the suspected cavity was a long-sought royal “Treasure Chamber.”

  In September 1986 the two Frenchmen, now openly on a mission on behalf of the French national energy company Electricité de France, returned to the pyramid—accompanied by geophysical experts of EdF who took charge of the operation. When the gravity-testing equipment reconfirmed the existence of an elongated “cavity” behind the corridor’s western wall, they used high-speed power tools to drill three holes through the wall toward the mysterious cavity; the idea, it was explained at the time, was to insert an endoscopic camera to find out what the cavity might hold.

  To their amazement, after drilling through some six feet of hard stone, the drilling equipment hit a two-foot layer of “Royal Limestone”—a rare limestone that was used in antiquity only for sculptures, being too soft for structural use. And then the drills reached a layer of sand. It was a very unusual kind of sand, according to what was published—a “powdery fine sand,” totally different from the sand of the Giza plateau.

  Figure 24

  What was one to make of all that? Both the highest Egyptian authorities—and the head of the scientific section in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs—were summoned. The published reports on the discovery (which occurred on September 6, 1986) stated that Dr. Ahmed Kadry, the new Chairman of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, who personally collected samples of the unusual sand into a plastic bag, described the sand as “more precious than gold.” The French representatives took samples of the sand for laboratory tests in France.

  Two days later, on September 8th, the Egyptian authorities ordered all the work stopped, and everyone was told to go home.

  While there was never an official announcement regarding the tests’ results, subsequent information circulated in Cairo that the sand “was apparently imported from another part of Egypt, was subsequently sifted, and then enriched with minerals before being placed in the pyramid by the ancient architects” (Reuters news agency March 6, 1987, report by its Cairo correspondent; emphasis mine).

  To use a metaphor, the amazing find of the mysterious sand disappeared under the sands of time; except that it triggered a chain of events that resulted in the discovery of a secret chamber—by me and two teammates, as I will soon tell.

  After the French, Japanese researchers from Tokyo’s Waseda University arrived in Giza with another kind of high-tech equipment (an electromagnetic scanner rather than the French microgravimetric instruments). By directing electromagnetic waves into the soil at an angle, they could determine what lay buried—a structure, artifacts, or a cavity. They received permission to examine the Sphinx and its surroundings, but in time they also re-checked the spot in the passage to the Queen’s Chamber where the French had drilled.

  The Japanese team spent in Giza ten days in January–February 1987. Their findings drew renewed attention to the enigma of the Sphinx. Newspapers were filled with “Sphinx news” (see examples from the Christian Science Monitor of Boston, the Daily Yomiuri of Tokyo, and Pravda in Moscow, fig. 25). They reported the discovery of several underground cavities at or near the Sphinx—and especially one that suggested the existence of a tunnel linking the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid.

  Their request for permission to explore the tunnel possibility by going down inside the pyramid to what is called the Pit, was denied. Indeed, the existence of the varied “cavities” and “tunnel” made the Egyptian authorities uneasy and reluctant to allow any further exploration at all. The chairman of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, Dr. Ahmed Kadry, was prominently reported to have stated that he would call a worldwide symposium of Egyptologists to evaluate all these new finds before more work would be allowed.

  Figure 25

  The scientific conclave was never called. But the interest in the Sphinx, revived by the Japanese researchers, led to other developments that had an impact on the main issue—the age of the Giza Pyramids: New ways emerged for dating all the Giza monuments by dating just one of them, the Sphinx.

  Now, to determine the age of the Sphinx—the original Sphinx—is no simple task. Drawings from Napoleon’s visit to Egypt showed the Sphinx buried in sands up to its neck; visitors stood on sands that high even in the nineteenth century (fig. 26). In fact, once excavations carried out in the 1920s uncovered the full body of the Sphinx, a stela was discovered between its paws in which the Pharaoh Thothmes IV recorded how he dug the Sphinx out of the sand dunes that covered it up to its neck—already in 1400 B.C.!

  Figure 26

  As anyone who had visited Giza in contemporary times (and before it was “restored” by being completely covered with fresh masonry in the 1990s) could easily see, the exposed Sphinx displayed two different body parts. Though carved out of natural bedrock, the lower parts and paws of the Sphinx were covered or “fleshed out” with masonry (fig. 27). It is known that such repairs or restorations with masonry had already taken place in 1400 B.C., in 700 B.C., and in the first and second centuries A.D.; some historians believe that similar restoration had even taken place in the time of Chefra, the presumed builder of the Sphinx. So these lower parts cannot serve to determine the original age of the Sphinx.

  The upper parts—the main body and the head—retained their natural bedrock origin; and those upper parts reveal severe erosion, running along horizontal strata (fig. 28). It has been generally assumed that this erosion was caused over time by the desert winds; but in the mid 1980s the author-researcher John Anthony West, in his book Serpent in the Sky and varied articles, suggested that the “weathering” on the Sphinx was due to erosion by water, not wind and windblown sand; and known ancient climate conditions and dates of wetter periods “made the Sphinx older than 10,000 B.C.”

  Figure 27

  This novel approach found, in 1990, support from an unexpected quarter in the person of Dr. Robert M. Schoch, a respected geologist at Boston University. In 1991 he was joined by Dr. Thomas Dobecki, a Houston-based geophysicist, in a presentation to the Geological Society of America in which they reported that their on-site researches confirmed the weathering by water, resulting in dating the Sphinx “to 7000 B.C. or earlier.”

  As with other challenges to established Egyptological tenets, that too—after more presentations, articles, TV programs, debates, and debunkings—ended up being ignored by the Egyptological establishment.

  Figure 28

  By 1990, Egypt witnessed a wave of a new breed of tourists—“New Agers” attracted by the stream of findings dating the Giza pyramids and Sphinx to much earlier times. Arriving by the hundreds and thousands, they came to see the handiwork of Extraterrestrials, Atlantis survivors, Osirians, or whomever—and to hear in lectures, conferences, and conventions what all that portends for the future.

  In 1992 I was again in Egypt, as a presenter at one such conference. The venue was the exclusive Mena House, a palatial hotel first built in the1890s to accommodate royalty. It is situated literally at the foot of the Giza promontory on which the pyramids and Sphinx stand, and it is a unique thrill to dine in the hotel’s grand restaurant with the Great Pyra
mid looming over you through the large windows.

  The hotel’s lounge, with its bar, tables, sofas, and corner recesses was where the “action” was after the formal lectures and meetings. It took no time to discover that the place was abuzz with rumors of what had “really been found” in secret chambers, what is hidden, why access is blocked here and there. It also took no time for two men to invite me to join them there for a drink. Among the varied messages that the hotel’s staff slipped to guests under the rooms’ doors, I found in mine an envelope with two business cards: One was of Dr. Alexander Shumilin, Chief of the Middle East Bureau of Pravda; the other, of Dmitri Veliki, Middle East Correspondent of Izvestia. They represented, respectively, the official dailies of the Soviet Government and the Soviet Communist Party; they were, as one had to unquestionably assume, agents of the KGB (the Soviet spy organization). I was too curious not to accept the invitation.

  They spoke good English and were obviously well informed in all matters of the Near East—politics, economics, history, and current affairs. They were also well informed about me, and about my books, including The Wars of Gods and Men that followed the first two. In The 12th Planet I dealt with the Sumerian Anunnaki gods and their coming to Earth from the planet Nibiru; in The Stairway to Heaven I dealt with the post-Diluvial spaceport in the Sinai peninsula and the construction of the Giza complex as part of the space facilities; and in the third book I dealt with the wars among the Anunnaki clans, including the “Pyramid Wars,” and the destruction of the spaceport with nuclear weapons.