Remnants of the Gods
Page 6
Anyone who, dripping with sweat, today climbs into the Great Pyramid first enters a passageway reminiscent of a Swiss mineshaft. The hole was made in the year AD 827. At the time, the Caliph Abdullah Al-Mamun wanted to get at the treasures which he assumed to be inside the pyramid. His raiding party did not find any entrance, so the men laboriously chiseled a shaft through the blocks of the pyramid. (Images 117–118) After 10 meters, the air became thin, stifling, and poisonous, because the torches used up what little oxygen there was. Unnerved, the troop wanted to give up, when suddenly they stood rooted to the spot. For a dull rolling sound and then a loud bang could be heard inside. Some stone must have dislodged and rumbled down. So the men tenaciously continued with their chiselling and finally came upon a passageway. That led to the actual entrance 16.5 meters above the ground or 10 layers of stone higher than the hole made by Al-Mamun. (Image 119) In the opposite direction, the shaft led to a corridor which is described as an “ascending passageway.” Boards with chicken ladders were put on the ground for the tourists, and railings were fixed to the walls. (Images 120–122) Anyone who wants to go up the passageway must crouch, because the 23-meter-long section is only about 1 meter high. Then the tourist—panting and dripping with sweat—enters the Grand Gallery. And that is when the next justified questions present themselves.
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The ascending passageway that leads to the Grand Gallery is so small and low that not even the sarcophagus which stands in the King’s Chamber would fit through it. (Image 123) The experts say that we have to imagine the Grand Gallery as a long, ascending hall in which stately processions proceeded to pay their last respects to the pharaoh. Yet the same procession of priests would first have had to crawl through the ascending passageway to reach the Grand Gallery at all. That does not make sense. Why this low ascending passageway?
At the upper end of the Grand Gallery we have the entrance to the King’s Chamber. Three-tonne stone trapdoors once blocked the entrance. The King’s Chamber feels like a cathedral. The rectangular space measures 5.22 meters in a north-south direction and 10.47 meters from east to west. The height is 5.82 meters. It is hard to understand why, with such dimensions, it is called a chamber. The walls consist of five granite beams laid one on top of the other—not set next to one another! The floor has also been lined with granite slabs. The walls feel like smooth marble. The ceiling of pink Aswan granite consists of nine huge beams and has been assembled with such precision that the joints are visible, at best, as thin black threads. And above this ceiling we have the next piece of nonsense: the relief chambers.
These are five hollow spaces stacked on top of one another above the King’s Chamber. The pharaoh’s engineers allegedly planned these five hollow spaces as relief chambers, the scientific consensus says. (Image 124) As long as 60 years ago, the Egyptologist Dr. Hermann Kees pointed out, “...the relief chambers over the coffin chamber of the Cheops pyramid, which by the way serve no purpose in terms of statics, are very original”12 (emphasis by Erich von Däniken). Who, then, had the unfortunate idea of calling these hollow spaces “relief chambers,” and why do hordes of scribblers and archaeologists quote this rubbish? The relief chambers do not even lie on the axis of the pyramid (that is, under its point), and they relieve nothing whatsoever. Furthermore, intentionally planned relief chambers assume that the Cheops engineers of 5,000 years ago had calculated the total weight of the pyramid. How can that be reconciled with the knowledge of the time? Such calculations have only become possible today as a result of computers. Would the King’s Chamber have collapsed without relief chambers? Would the pyramid have caved in? Nonsense. The space above the ceiling could simply have been supported with granite beams whose weight did not rest on the ceiling of the King’s Chamber. Moreover, where are the other relief chambers in the pyramid? The relief chambers spontaneously remind me of a Shinto temple—a gate to another world.
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The experts provide evidence of the fact that Cheops from the Fourth Dynasty built the pyramid, evidence which, on closer inspection, turns out to be of little value, as I intend to show. What do the ancient historians actually have to say about it, those men who wrote about Egypt, about the construction of the pyramids, some 2,000 years ago?
Diodorus of Sicily (first century BC), the author, no less, of a 40-volume work of history, states:
The eighth king was Chemmis from Memphis. The latter governed for 50 years and built the largest of the three pyramids which are considered to belong to the seven Wonders of the World.... It consists completely of hard stone, which is very difficult to work but also lasts eternally.... It is told that the stone was brought from far away in Arabia.... And the most wondrous thing is, although works of such magnitude were built here, and the surrounding region consists of nothing but sand, no trace has been left either of an embankment or the cutting of stones so that the impression is given as if this work had not been created gradually by human hand but had been placed finished all at once into the sandy desert as if by a god....13
The greatest mocker among the classical historians, Gaius Plinius Secundus, who moreover had the advantage of knowing all the works of his predecessors, also described the Egyptian pyramids:
The material for the largest pyramids was supplied by the quarries of Arabia and...all three (pyramids) were completed in 78 years and four months. The following authors have described the pyramids: Herodotus, Euhemerus, Duris of Samos, Aristagoras, Dionysius, Artemidorus, Alexander Polyhistor, Butoridas, Antisthenes, Demetrius, Demoteles, and Apion. But none of them can say who actually built them....14
Not bad. Gaius knows 12 works on the pyramids and expressly notes that no one knows who built them. And that millennia ago.
In 1850, a stele was found in the ruins of the Isis temple which today can be seen in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The inscription says that Cheops had established the house of Isis, the lady of the pyramid, beside the house of the Sphinx. If Isis is described as “lady of the pyramid,” then the Great Pyramid was already standing when Cheops appeared on the scene. Furthermore, the Sphinx (Images 125–126) would also already have existed which, in the opinion of the archaeologists, is only said to have been built by Chefren, who succeeded Cheops.
In around AD 1360, the Arab historian Al-Maqrizi (1364–1442) collected all the available documents about the pyramids. He published that material in the “pyramid chapter” of his work Hitat.15 In it, we learn that the Great Pyramid was built as long ago as before the Flood by a king named Saurid. Who was this Saurid? The Hitat says about him that “he was Hermes, whom the Arabs call Idris.”16 God himself had instructed him in astronomy and revealed to him that a catastrophe would come to pass over the earth, but that a small part of it would remain in which the sciences would be urgently required. Thereupon “Saurid” alias Hermes alias Idris had built the pyramids. This is explained in greater detail in Chapter 33 of the Hitat:
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The first Hermes, who was called the Thrice-Great in his capacity as prophet, king, and sage. He is the one whom the Hebrews call Enoch, the son of Jared, son of Mahalalel, son of Kenan, son of Enos, son of Seth, son of Adam—blessings be upon him—and who read in the stars that the Flood would come. So he had the pyramids built and saved in them treasures, learned writings, and everything about which he was concerned that it would be lost and could disappear, in order to protect these things and keep them well.17
It is not only in the Hitat that Enoch alias Hermes is named as the builder of the pyramids. The Arab explorer and writer Ibn Battuta (14th century) also affirmed that Enoch had built the pyramids before the Flood “to keep in them books of science and knowledge and other valuable objects.”18
Confusing. But nothing was found in the pyramids. Not so fast! The discoveries are still to be made.
The Hitat counts six generations before Enoch. Al-Maqrizi, the author, clearly knows what
he is talking about, because Enoch is the seventh patriarch before the Flood. Enoch means “the initiate, the insightful, the knowledgeable” in Hebrew. I have reported about this Enoch in many of my books and will therefore refrain from any repetition here. (The most detailed report about Enoch can be found in source Falsch Informiert.19)
On the Sumerian King List
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But it was Cheops and not Enoch who built the Great Pyramid, the critics reply. This Cheops does indeed occur in the lists of kings, for example on a temple wall in Abydos. There we have the Cheops from the Fourth Dynasty—but not a single glyph mentions that he is the builder of the Great Pyramid. Why ever not? Because the ancient Egyptians did not know who had the pyramid built. And what about the glyph and the name “Cheops” daubed into one of the relief chambers?
The chemist and pyramid researcher Alireza Zarei refers in his exceptionally well-documented book Die verletzte Pyramide (The Damaged Pyramid) to various ways of writing and interpretations of the name “Cheops.” There is little which is unambiguous and clear. Moreover, so Alireza Zarei writes, “a further inscription of the Pharaoh Cheops” had been found “on the fourth layer of stones of the west wall.”22 Finally, a 5-centimeter-high image of a seated Cheops had turned up in the Chontamenti temple in Abydos. It can be admired today in the Egyptian Museum. (Image 128) Yet not a whisper here either that the seated Cheops had ordered the Great Pyramid to be built. And to dot the “i,” the father of history, Herodotus, names Cheops/Khufu as the builder of the pyramid. What more does anyone want? Cheops has been nailed down. Or has he?
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The detective work is not as simple as it looks. To begin with, it must be noted that none of the historians of antiquity who visited Egypt 2,000 years ago and asked the priests at the time know anything about a Cheops. The exception is Herodotus: he came from Halicarnassus in Asia Minor and became the globetrotter of his age. Egypt, which he entered in July 448 BC, was a new world for Herodotus. Thus he took a note of everything that his interlocutors told him about the history of their country and meticulously distinguished between what he was told and what he saw with his own eyes. Herodotus wrote he had been told a Pharaoh called “Khufu” had had the Great Pyramid built within 20 years. “Khufu” is Egyptian—in Greek he is called “Cheops,” hence the name Cheops. In this case, Egyptologists ignored all other historians who knew nothing about a Cheops and threw themselves on Herodotus’ statement. The following example shows the selective way in which they proceeded.
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Herodotus reports that a pharaoh called Menes had ordered the Nile to be diverted above Memphis. The Egyptologists like this statement. Eighteen lines later, the same Herodotus writes, “Menes was followed by 330 kings whose names the priests read out from a book.” The diversion of the Nile fit, the 330 kings did not. Or, in the second book of his Histories, Herodotus writes that the priests in Thebes had personally shown him 341 statues and all these statues together represented 11,340 years. At that time, the gods had still lived among humans. Since then, they had no longer come. Herodotus gives the express assurance: “The Egyptians are absolutely sure of that, because they have continuously counted and written down the years.”23
For Egyptology, the 333 kings or 11,340 years are absolute nonsense, even if all the other historians of antiquity provide equally “impossible” numbers of years—numbers which, without exception, go beyond 10,000 BC.
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Cheops is said to have been a tyrant. Vanity lies in the nature of every tyrant. Yet the Great Pyramid of the Pharaoh Cheops is totally anonymous. How can a tyrant have the mightiest structure on earth built without boasting about it, without immortalizing his name with just a single tiny glyph? The total absence of any inscription is nothing but perverse; the anonymity of the structure does not fit with the character of the principal.
Pliny wrote, “...so the creators of this vanity have rightly fallen victim to the past.”24 Vanity and namelessness are incompatible. If the Pharaoh Cheops was vain, indeed, a tyrant and oppressor (Herodotus), then his heroic deeds should be heralded on every wall. The objection has been raised that his oppressed people chiselled away the hieroglyphs praising the deeds of their dictator. When? The pyramid was completely sealed. No raving madman could enter it to give vent to his fury on the inscriptions of the pharaoh. Modern academic opinion, moreover, holds that no slaves were employed in ancient Egypt.25 The first person to break open the pyramid after millennia was the Caliph Al-Mamun. What did he actually find?
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Al-Mamun opened the Great Pyramid. I visited its interior and saw a large vaulted chamber whose base formed a square while it was round above. In the middle there was a square well shaft with the depth of ten cubits. If one climbs down into it, one discovers on each of its four sides a gateway leading to a large room in which corpses lie: the sons of Adam....26
In the Hitat, we can also read that Al-Mamun found several corpses with strange armour inside the pyramid, as well as books in an unfamiliar writing. Excuse me? Al-Mamun and his scholars would undoubtedly have been able to read hieroglyphs from the time of Cheops.
In about 300 BC, a priest and historian called Manetho lived in Egypt. Eight works are attributed to him, including a book on the history of Egypt. Manetho’s books have been lost, but the historian Julius Africanus (died c. 240 BC) and the Church Father Eusebius (died AD 339) recorded information from Manetho.27, 28 He reports that the first ruler of Egypt was Hephaestus, who had also brought fire. He was followed by Chronos; Osiris; Typhon, brother of Osiris; then Horus, son of Osiris and Isis. “After the gods, the demigods reigned for 1,255 years. And again other kings ruled for 1,817 years. Then another thirty kings of Memphis, 1,790 years. And then ten kings of Thinis for 350 years. The reign of the demigods comprised 5,813 years...”29
The Church Father Eusebius attempted to interpret Manetho’s numbers—and all of them, not just the ones listed here—as lunar years. But the lunar years calculated backwards in earth years still produced a figure beyond 14,000 BC.
Things become even more confusing: according to the Sumerian King List
re, the important thing is not the zeros but the numbers.
This numbers game has absolutely nothing to do with the Cheops of the Fourth Dynasty and yet it illustrates something which is common to everything. In time immemorial, there must have been an original teach-ing—the numbers cannot be explained in any other way. These mysterious origins must, of necessity, lie very far in the past. The history books would know about it otherwise.
The scribbles of the word “Cheops” in the Great Pyramid do not prove that he built it. (Image 129) Although it is said that Al-Mamun was the first to have broken into the pyramid after Cheops, tomb robbers have always tunneled into the structure. Assuming for a moment that the pyramid already stood at the time of Cheops, it cannot be excluded that someone broke into it then and daubed all kinds of things on the walls and ceiling of the relief chambers with red paint. Perhaps also the word Cheops, with the red paint then dripping through the cracks. It is also conceivable that there were several “Cheopses” in the long course of Egyptian history. After all, there were also several Ramses and several Amenemhets. We need only think of the 333 kings mentioned by Herodotus or the list of Manetho. It is also conceivable that the tyrant Cheops from the Fourth Dynasty appropriated the building. In the controversy about who was responsible for building the pyramid, I would like to put forward another thought which argues against the Cheops from the Fourth Dynasty—an argument which it has only become possible to advance because of the most recent discoveries in the pyramid.