Without doubt, however, not one of them would be embarking on the little adventure I had planned for myself that day—a seven-kilometer round-trip into the fringes of the western Egyptian desert, far from the throngs of bustling, chattering tourists that flocked in endless streams to absorb the delights of Egypt’s more obvious attractions.
This was the start of an adventure that had, by this time, been over two years in the making, an adventure that had begun with a simple idea, a fleeting moment of inspired thought that had been burning in my mind from that first moment of epiphany some years back to my presence now in Egypt. And the thought that I was now here at Giza in the shadow of the great pyramids to pursue my curiosity brought with it a near permanent broad smile to my face, and more often than not this had others looking at me quizzically, wondering what secret lay behind my barely concealed excitement. One or two people I’d been chatting with at breakfast that morning had asked of my plans for the day, and I had simply told them that I’d be going on a long walk of discovery. This was all perfectly true, although the “discovery” part remained to be seen. I could sense, though, from their polite questioning, that they knew I was not being entirely open with them. The simple fact was, I couldn’t be. Not yet; it was much too early.
After a few minutes impatiently pacing back and forth around the foyer, I was approached by the hotel concierge, who told me that my taxi was waiting outside. This was it; my quest to discover the legendary chamber of Osiris had finally begun. I quickly gathered my belongings from the lobby floor—backpack, the obligatory hat, and camera—and hurried through the sliding doors out into the blazing sunshine. Even this early in the day and year, Giza’s climate was far from kind to a fair-skinned Scotsman more used to battling through sheets of horizontal rain than sweltering under a vertical wall of searing heat. For sure, before the day was out, I would be slapping on the sunblock aplenty and using every fluid ounce of water I had packed.
Before climbing into the taxi I made one final check inside my backpack, double-checking that everything was there—water, sunblock, Ordnance Survey maps, compass, pedometer, and, of course, the small, granite pyramid “capstone” I had carried with me all the way from my home in Scotland to Giza—my very own “philosopher’s stone,” my “gift to Osiris.”
Finding everything in order, I clambered into the beat-up taxi and gave the driver my destination—the amphitheater at Giza. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t seem to understand my broad Scottish brogue. And speaking little to zero Egyptian Arabic, I took the backpack and pulled out a map, held it up, and pointed to the open-air theater that stood just to the west of the pyramid of Khafre (Chephren in Greek), the second largest of the Giza pyramids (although it actually appears larger than Khufu’s Great Pyramid as a result of it having been built on the central, high ground of the plateau).
The driver squinted his eyes at the map, shook his head, and spoke in broken English. “No theater. Gone. Theater closed.”
“Yes, I know it’s closed,” I said, nodding reassuringly. “Theater please.” I tapped a finger on the map a couple of times, as if this would somehow convey to the driver that I knew what I was doing, even if he didn’t. He casually shrugged his shoulders, muttered something in Arabic, puffed on his cigarette, slipped the car into gear, and we set off.
I had traveled by bus and taxi a number of times by then in and around Cairo and had come to learn that each new experience would surely be no less hair-raising than all the others. Taxis, buses, trucks, horses with carts, and donkeys all shared the same highway, and it didn’t seem to perturb any of them how slow or fast they traveled; there didn’t seem to be a speed limit. Vehicles had indicators, but these were rarely, if ever, used. By far the “indicator” of choice was the car horn, thousands of them beeping and blasting in a cacophony of noise at anything that came too close or insisted in squeezing past. Buses and trucks casually drifted across lanes toward each other almost at will and would have made a taxi sandwich of us on a number of occasions but for the sharp braking or accelerating of my driver who, after a few sharp blasts on his own car horn, was otherwise underwhelmed by it, seemed to take it all in his stride—a typical day at the office. I lost count of the number of times I found myself gnawing on a knuckle as some pedestrian stepped straight out into the oncoming traffic, hand aloft like a police traffic controller in order to get himself across the busy road.
I’d been in the taxi no more than ten minutes when, in the distance, a great geometrical shape suddenly appeared on the horizon, towering high above the urban sprawl of houses, shops, high-rise apartment buildings, and construction cranes: the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, known to Egyptologists simply as G1. It was hard to imagine that thousands of years ago this entire area—but for the pyramid site itself—would have been nothing but remote and empty desert for as far as the eye could see. The main method of transportation in ancient times wouldn’t have been by motor vehicle on bustling, crazy highways but rather by boat along the banks of the great River Nile, the main artery and lifeblood of the country. Egypt truly was, as the Greek historian Herodotus had written more than two millennia ago, the “Gift of the Nile,” for without this great waterway irrigating and fertilizing the Nile Valley for thousands of miles, Egypt simply could never and would never have existed.
Seeing the Great Pyramid looming large on the horizon brought back memories of my first visit to this magnificent monument some two days earlier on the spring equinox, when, in the company of world-renowned alternative historians and authors Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval, I stood in humble, reverent silence between the paws of the Sphinx, watching the equinoctial sunrise. At this special time of year at Giza the eternal gaze of the Sphinx is fixed due east, directly on the disc of the sun as it begins to peep over the eastern horizon—truly a spectacular sight to behold (see figure 1.1).
As the blazing golden orb of the sun gradually emerged ahead, behind us the last flicker of a glorious silver moon was sinking in the west beyond the darkened silhouette of Khafre’s majestic pyramid, these wondrous, celestial mechanics drawing gasps of fascination and delight from a few other hardy souls who had ventured out that early, chilly March morning to bear witness to this unique and awe-inspiring spectacle.
Figure 1.1. The Sphinx greets the dawn.
Thirty minutes or so later the entire Giza plateau was tinged with golden-orange hues from the newly risen sun, and farther up the plateau in the distance the eastern flanks of the three giant pyramids were burning a fiery red, just as they had done for thousands of years. From my vantage point at the rear of the Sphinx enclosure I had a grand view of all three of the main pyramids, although the base of the Great Pyramid was partially obscured here by the rise of the plateau. With these three giant geometric shapes thrusting up from the desert sands into a cloudless sky, it was truly surreal, a landscape that seemed more like something from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey than something created from the hands of an ancient people who had lived thousands of years earlier at the dawn of history.
From this distance the triangular form of the pyramids appeared quite perfect, the ragged edges of the layers upon layers of stacked limestone blocks barely perceptible. The outer casing stones of white Tura limestone that had once made the pyramid’s sides perfectly smooth (rather than their current stepped appearance) had long since vanished after an earthquake in medieval times had apparently loosened them, bringing them crashing to the ground, whereupon the grateful citizens of Cairo quarried them for various new buildings and monuments around the ancient city. Today at Giza only the uppermost section of Khafre’s Pyramid and the bases of Khufu’s and Menkaure’s Pyramids still present some of these smooth outer casing stones.
My objective that first morning had been to visit the Great Pyramid, which Egyptologists have attributed to Khufu (Cheops in Greek), the second king of the Fourth Dynasty of ancient Egypt, who, according to Egyptologists, lived circa 2,550 BCE. I had a very particular reason for wanting to visit the Great Pyramid a
nd especially so at this special time of the year, at sunrise during the spring (vernal) equinox.
In the company of Bauval, I trudged up the sloping plateau in the direction of Khafre’s Pyramid, roughly following the line of the great causeway that had once run from the Valley and Sphinx Temples (which, in ancient times, would have graced a small harbor on the banks of the Nile) up to the ruins of the so-called Mortuary Temple, which had once stood on the east face of the pyramid. Something about this placement of Khafre’s Pyramid on the plateau had always puzzled me; I turned to Bauval.
“Robert,” I began as we walked together up the gentle slope of the plateau toward the middle pyramid of Khafre, “if Khufu was the first king to build a pyramid here on the plateau, why did he not choose for himself the high, central ground where Khafre built his pyramid? Why did Khufu opt to build his pyramid over on the lower ground at the very edge of the plateau? Surely if Khufu was the first king to build a pyramid here at Giza he would have chosen the high, central ground of the plateau. By doing that he could have ensured that no future king would have been able to surpass his achievement. Why didn’t Khufu build his pyramid on the high ground of the plateau?”
With his customary enigmatic smile, Bauval replied simply, “Because, Scott, there was a plan—a grand plan.”
There was little need for Bauval to say any more. I knew he was right, although it had taken me many years of research on my own to become convinced of such a grand plan. Conventional Egyptology, however, has little time for such suggestions. To the Egyptologists the pyramids—all of them—simply reflected the will of the particular king in whose name each pyramid was supposedly built (as his eternal tomb). Ideas of a preconceived, grand, unified plan are summarily dismissed. The pyramids, the Egyptologists insist, were singular, royal funerary edifices built in splendid isolation on the whim of the ruling king with little or no regard for what had gone before or would come after. In short, the pyramids were not built to satisfy the requirements of any grand, preconceived plan, as a growing number of independent researchers have long argued, but each one is simply the tomb of each individual ancient Egyptian king.
Of course, for Egyptologists to accept the notion that there was a grand, preconceived, transgenerational project that had been set in motion by the ancient Egyptians to build a whole series of giant pyramids (about sixteen of them) would place a serious question mark over the Egyptologists’ tomb theory, so it is understandable why most Egyptologists have rejected such ideas out of hand; a “grand, preconceived plan” and the “tombs of kings” are essentially ideas that are regarded as being mutually exclusive. However, as will be demonstrated throughout the course of this book, the evidence in support of such a preconceived, transgenerational grand plan is considerable and should not be so readily dismissed.
Snaking up the plateau, Bauval and I veered off to the right in the direction of the Great Pyramid. From where I was now standing, close to its southeast corner, the light was just right for me to see what I had come here and hoped, on that special day of the year, to observe. It is a feature of the Great Pyramid that was first observed by early European pyramid explorers at the beginning of the eighteenth century and is probably best described by modern Egyptologist J. P. Lepre.
One very unusual feature of the Great Pyramid is a concavity of the core that makes the monument an eight-sided figure, rather than four-sided like every other Egyptian pyramid. That is to say, that its four sides are hollowed in or indented along their central lines, from base to peak. This concavity divides each of the apparent four sides in half, creating a very special and unusual eight-sided pyramid; and it is executed to such an extraordinary degree of precision as to enter the realm of the uncanny. For, viewed from any ground position or distance, this concavity is quite invisible to the naked eye. The hollowing-in can be noticed only from the air, and only at certain times of the day. This explains why virtually every available photograph of the Great Pyramid does not show the hollowing-in phenomenon, and why the concavity was never discovered until the age of aviation. It was discovered quite by accident in 1940, when a British Air Force pilot, P. Groves, was flying over the pyramid. He happened to notice the concavity and captured it in the now-famous photograph.1
Lepre’s account of the discovery of this phenomenon is not quite accurate since, during the equinox of March 21, 1934, French Egyptologist André Pochan had photographed the south side of the Great Pyramid, where he observed that the western side (triangle) of the pyramid’s southern face was lighter than the opposite eastern triangle. Pochan believed that there was a clear purpose for this phenomenon, regarding it as a marker for the equinoxes. Pochan’s discovery was published in a communication to the Institute of Egypt in September 1935. Some five years later the famous aerial photograph of this phenomenon was taken by Groves.
Certainly before 1940 there were very few (if any) aerial photographs of the Great Pyramid that allowed this peculiar feature of the structure to be observed. Nevertheless, contrary to what Lepre has stated in his book, this feature of the Great Pyramid can indeed be observed from the ground under favorable lighting conditions, as Pochan’s photos have shown and as I could now observe for myself. There it was—the southern face of the Great Pyramid seemingly split into two halves due to the different shades of light cast from the sun rising due east, sideways onto the ever-so-slightly indented (southern) slope of the pyramid. And though it is often difficult to observe this peculiar phenomenon of the pyramid throughout the year, the slightly inward-leaning concave faces of the pyramid that bring about this astronomical event are physical features that are most certainly measurable, as noted by pioneering Egyptologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, whom many regard as the father of modern Egyptology. He writes, “I continually observed that the courses of the core had dips of as much as ½° to 1°.”2
Also contrary to what Lepre writes, there is in fact one other pyramid—the Pyramid of Menkaure (G3) at Giza—that also clearly exhibits this peculiar eight-sided feature. However, of the 138 or so known pyramids in Egypt today, these are the only two pyramids (figure 1.2) that clearly demonstrate these peculiar concave faces, and, suffice it to say, it is a feature of these pyramids that conventional Egyptology struggles to reasonably explain. What could this feature mean, and why do we find it only in the largest and smallest of the main pyramids at Giza? Why not also in the middle pyramid of Khafre (G2) or in the other giant pyramids at Abu Roash, Saqqara, Meidum, or Dahshur?
Figure 1.2. The concave slopes of G1 (right) and G3
The precision with which these indented slopes were executed on the four faces of these two pyramids demonstrates that they were clearly intended from the outset in the design of the pyramids, and the considerable additional effort required to construct them implies that they were integral to the pyramid’s design right from the outset and were clearly designed to serve some very specific purpose.
Certainly designing the Great Pyramid with these slightly inward-sloping elevations means that it can function as an effective equinoctial marker (as Pochan suggested), essentially marking when day and night are of equal length, when the days will become longer and the nights shorter, and, of course, vice versa on the autumnal equinox. And it stands to reason that for the pyramid to successfully function as an equinoctial “clock,” it would be imperative for the builders to ensure that the structure was perfectly aligned to the cardinal directions, otherwise this phenomenon would not appear exactly on the equinox. In this regard it is no surprise to find that the Great Pyramid is one of the most accurately aligned structures in the world, being only three-sixtieths of one degree from being perfectly aligned to the cardinal directions, an alignment error that is smaller than that of the Greenwich Observatory.
But there is a problem with this idea of marking the equinoxes. If this was indeed the intent of the builders, then to do such requires only one structure with these concave faces. So why did the builders opt to make their construction issues doubly difficult by b
uilding two pyramids at Giza with these concave faces when, as stated, one such structure would have sufficed? Or is it perhaps the case that some other underlying rationale is involved here to explain the decision to build two eight-sided pyramids? It was the answer to this particular question that would ultimately lead me to a breakthrough in the understanding of these peculiar features built into these two pyramids, and it was an answer that has the potential to change everything we think we know about the builders of these ancient monuments and, indeed, why they built them.
There also are hints from antiquity that the eight-sided nature of these two pyramids at Giza was known then and that there was some significance attached to them. Curiously, if we imagine this eight-sided pyramid flattened onto the ground, it presents to us the form of a Templar Cross, an ancient symbol of which the eminent 32nd-Degree Freemason Frank C. Higgins tells us:
The characteristic crosses of the Knights Templar, which are faithfully reproduced by the modern Masonic fraternity, are not Calvary crosses, or the type signifying the supreme drama of Christian faith, but four-fold triangles joined at the apexes, the same being identical with a form highly symbolic throughout the ancient East from a period as remote as several thousand years before Christ. They are shown in company with representations of the sun, moon and stars and various zodiacal signs suspended from the necks of the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian monarchs. They are in fact, flattened pyramids and possess the same significance.3
It seems then that the Templar Cross (figure 1.3) depicting the eight-sided pyramid suggests that knowledge of the concavities of the Great Pyramid had been observed long ago and also that some significance was known to have been attributed to these curious features. Why else would Higgins tell us “they [Templar Crosses] are in fact, flattened pyramids and possess the same significance”?
The Secret Chamber of Osiris: Lost Knowledge of the Sixteen Pyramids Page 2
