The Message of the Sphinx AKA Keeper of Genesis

by Graham Hancock

  In 1973, as we saw in Chapter 5, the Egyptian Antiquities Organization (EAO) granted an official license to the SRI, permitting it to conduct surveys around the Great Sphinx at Giza using ground-penetrating radar and seismographs. The local sponsor of this project was Cairo’s Ain Shams University. We recall that in the same year Hugh Lynn Cayce sent Mark Lehner to the American University in Cairo with funds raised by ARE members.

  In 1976 a second NASA probe, Viking I, went into Mars orbit. In the region known as Cydonia it photographed several more pyramidial structures (including the five-sided ‘D&M Pyramid’) and the famous ‘Face’. Complete with its distinctive Sphinx-like headdress, this latter feature has been calculated from the NASA images to be 1.6 miles in length from crown to chin, 1.2 miles wide, and just under 2,600 feet high. NASA has argued officially that it is nothing more than a small mountain, naturally weathered. But how many mountains have their left and right sides so intricately similar? Image analysts say that the ‘bilateral symmetry’ of the Face, mimicking a natural, almost human appearance, is most unlikely to have come about by chance. And this impression is confirmed by other characteristics that have subsequently been identified under computer enhancement. These include ‘teeth’ in the mouth, bilaterally crossed lines above the eyes, and regular lateral stripes in the headpiece—suggestive, to some researchers at least, of the nemes headdress of ancient Egyptian pharaohs.[734]

  Back in Egypt in 1977, a year after the Viking images had first reached the Earth, Mark Lehner made contact with NASA’s Dr. Lambert T. Dolphin, leader of the Stanford Research Institute project at the Sphinx. The reader will recall from Chapter 5 that Lehner was by then already well acquainted with Zahi Hawass.

  Later in 1977 Lambert Dolphin traveled to Virginia Beach to negotiate funding from the Edgar Cayce organization for a proposed new SRI project at Giza. The purpose of this project was to use the latest remote sensing technology to search for hidden chambers around and under the Sphinx—with Lehner again ‘participating as the Edgar Cayce Foundation’s “man in Cairo”.’ Several underground ‘cavities’ were detected by this Sphinx Exploration Project.

  In 1978 Mark Lehner proposed a project on the Sphinx to the American Research Centre in Egypt. The project, again partially financed by the Edgar Cayce group, was approved and went ahead with Lehner as its Field Director. Soon afterwards a United States registered company called Recovery Systems International (RSI) appeared on the scene. As we saw in Chapter 5, it undertook core drillings in front of the Sphinx to investigate the promising underground cavities previously pinpointed by SRI.

  In 1983 Hugh Lynn Cayce died and the management of the Edgar Cayce group was handed to his son, Charles Thomas Cayce. In the same year ‘The Independent Mars Project’ was set up in the United States by Richard Hoagland, a former NASA consultant, and Lambert Dolphin. Meanwhile in 1987 Dr. Zahi Hawass completed his education in the United States and returned to Egypt to be appointed as the EAO’s Director-General of the Giza Plateau.

  In March 1996 Dr. Hawass announced that the Egyptian scientist Farouk El Baz (whose name, meaning Hawk, translates into ancient Egyptian as Horus) had been chosen to lead a team to open the secret door inside the Great Pyramid at the end of the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber. The reader will recall that Amtex, the Canadian company participating in the project, claim to be ‘working with Spar Aerospace’ to devise a tool to open or ‘go straight through’ the door. Spar Aerospace are better known for manufacturing hydraulic arms used in NASA Space Shuttles. As we noted at the beginning of this appendix, Dr. El Baz, a graduate of Cairo’s Ain Shams university, is a NASA consultant. He has been involved for many years with studies of geological formations on the Moon and on Mars and he is a one-time personal friend of astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. It was El Baz, nicknamed the King by his NASA colleagues, who in 1969 chose the spot for the Apollo 11 Moon landing. El Baz is the founder of the Centre of Remote Sensing at Boston University and presently serves as its Director.[735]

  Also in March 1996 the EAO granted a one-year renewable license for the project at die Sphinx—see above—financed by Joseph Schor. Project members include Boris Said, Thomas Dobecki, and four senior geologists from Florida State University, who began work with a million dollars worth of ground-penetrating radar and seismic equipment at their disposal. It was reported to us that team members had consulted with Dr. James Hurtak and Richard Hoagland in August 1996.

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  * * *

  [1] Selim Hassan, Excavations at Giza, Government Press, Cairo, 1946, Vol. VI, Part I, pp. 34-5

  [2] Ibid.

  [3] E. A. Wallis Budge, An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1978, Vol. I, p. 469.

  [4] Selim Hassan, The Sphinx: Its History in the Light of Recent Excavations, Government Press, Cairo, 1949, p. 76. See also Veronica Seton-Williams and Peter Stock, Blue Guide Egypt, A. & C. Black, London, 1988, p. 432.

  [5] Zahi Hawass and Mark Lehner, ‘The Sphinx: Who Built It and Why’, Archaeology, September-October 1994, p. 34. See also E. A. Wallis Budge, Hieroglyphic Dictionary, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 752.

  [6] We have many surprising survivals from the ancient Egyptian language in the English language. For example the small species of greyhound that we know as the ‘Whippet’ derives its name from the ancient Egyptian canine deity Upuaut, the ‘Opener of the Ways’. Normandi Ellis in her excellent Awakening Osiris, Phanes Press, Grand Rapids, 1988, cites other examples: ‘armen/arm; heku (magic utterance)/hex; neb (spiralling force of the universe)/nebulous; Satis (goddess of the flood, or meaning enough)/satisfy; aor (magic light)/aura’.

  [7] I. E. S. Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt, Pelican Books, London, 1949, p. 106.

  [8] Ahmed Fakhry, The Pyramids, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1969, p. 159.

  [9] Mark Lehner, ‘Computer Rebuilds the Ancient Sphinx’, National Geographic Vol. 179, No. 4, April 1991; Mark Lehner, ‘Reconstructing the Sphinx’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, April 1992.

  [10] National Geographic, April 1991, op. cit.

  [11] Ibid.

  [12] Ibid.

  [13] Cambridge Archaeological Journal, op. cit., pp. 10 and 11.

  [14] Ibid., p. 9.

  [15] Ibid., p. 20.

  [16] John Anthony West, Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt, Quest Books, Wheaton, 111, 1993, p. 231.

  [17] Ibid., p. 232.

  [18] American Association for the Advancement of Science, Chicago, 7 February 1992, debate: ‘How Old is the Sphinx?’

  [19] Cambridge Archaeological Journal, op. cit., p. 6.

  [20] For a fuller discussion of the dating issue see Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods, William Heinemann Ltd., London, 1995, and Crown Publishers, New York, 1995, p. 51.

  [21] Hassan, The Sphinx, op. cit., p. 75.

  [22] Cambridge Archaeological Journal, op. cit., p. 6

  [23] E. A. Wallis Budge, ‘Stela of the Sphinx’ in A History of Egypt, London, 1902, Vol. IV, p. 80ff.

  [24] Ibid., pp. 85-6.

  [25] James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Histories and Mysteries of Man Ltd., London, 1988, Volume II, p. 324.

  [26] Ibid.

  [27] Ibid.

  [28] National Geographic, April 1991, op. cit.

  [29] Gaston Maspero, The Passing of Empires, New York, 1900.

  [30] James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 83-5.

  [31] Gaston Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, SPCK, London, 1894, p. 247.

  [32] Gaston Maspero, A Manual of Egyptian Archaeology, p. 74.

  [33] Hassan, The Sphinx, op. cit., p. 91.

  [34] American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1992, debate ‘How Old is the Sphinx?’, op. cit.

  [35] Archaeology, September-October 1994, op. cit., pp. 32-3.

  [36] Ibid., p. 34.

  [37] R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, Sacred Science, Inner Traditions International, Rochester Vt., 1988, p. 96.

  [
38] John Anthony West, Serpent, op. cit., pp. 1-2.

  [39] Ibid., p. 186.

  [40] Ibid., p. 187.

  [41] Ibid., p. 226.

  [42] Ibid., p. 225.

  [43] Ibid., p. 226.

  [44] Ibid., p. 227.

  [45] Ibid.

  [46] Ibid.

  [47] Ibid., pp. 226-7.

  [48] Ibid., p. 228.

  [49] Interviewed in NBC television documentary Mystery of the Sphinx, 1993.

  [50] John Anthony West, Serpent, op. cit., p. 227.

  [51] Quoted in An Akhbar El Yom, 8 January 1994.

  [52] John Anthony West, Serpent, op. cit., p. 229.

  [53] Boston Globe, 23 October 1991.

  [54] Los Angeles Times, 23 October 1991.

  [55] John Anthony West, Serpent, op. cit., p. 229.

  [56] Ibid.

  [57] Ibid.