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Egypt: New Myths For Old
Nothing succeeds like Egypt. Although its fabled magic and mystery have by now beeome something of a well worn eliehé, it is, largely, only academic historians who lament the fact. Something about the land of Tutankhamun, the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid instantly dwarfs all other cultures in our imaginations, although many of them — such as the pre-Columbian peoples of South America - also built pyramids that continue to perplex us with their mystery and sheer technical perfection.
A recent spate of highly successful books has not only asserted that ancient Egypt was considerably more sophisticated than academics will admit, but also promised that mind-bending revelations connected with that venerable civilisation will soon shake the world. These secrets will somehow emanate from ancient Egyptian sources and affect us all in one way or another. And, of course, they will be timed to coincide with the Millennium.
A mystery does surround the ancient Egyptians and their culture. Immensely impressive data does reveal that the ancient Egyptians were far more sophisticated than Egyptologists admit. Indeed, mainstream Egyptologists seem curiously blind to the achievements and beliefs of the very people they have chosen to study. However, there is a backlash against this academic arrogance - and like all extreme reactions, it presents problems of its own, not least because this particular backlash has been carefully orchestrated.
The last decade has seen the rapid rise of an Egyptological counterculture. It began as a challenge to the rigid views of the academics, but has now effectively become a new orthodoxy with an equally unyielding ‘doctrine’ of its own.
There is a strong case for challenging much of the standard Egyptological view. Many recent bestsellers - such as Keeper of Genesis by Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock (1996), From Atlantis to the Sphinx (1996) by Colin Wilson and Gods of Eden (1998) by Andrew Collins — have daringly tackled the academics, rightly criticising their stubbornness and blindness and presenting an alternative view of the subject. In our view, much of this was long overdue. Historians and Egyptologists have had it all their own way for too long. Many of them have been far too ready to dismiss the ancient Egyptians as ‘primitive’, while the evidence of our own eyes, in the shape of the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx, tells us otherwise. And, of course, their incredible knowledge — teased out of the ancient Pyramid Texts - is also routinely ignored or even roundly rubbished.
However, many — but not all — exponents of the New Orthodoxy who dare to ‘publish and be damned’ appear to be motivated by something more than a sense of solidarity with a culture that is rarely given its due. This wave of new books is not just a timely recognition of ancient Egyptian genius (although of course there is an element of that, which must be applauded). As we discovered, something else is involved here, something deeply unsettling.
Among certain of the so-called ‘pyramidiots’ (the academics’ term for the alternative Egyptologists, which no doubt includes ourselves) we have discerned a very interesting but disturbing tendency. As we will see, some members of the New Orthodoxy — but by no means all - hide another agenda behind their apparently laudable and open-minded attack on the arrogance of academia. Through the mass media, these writer-researchers have promoted what is essentially a belief system that is not only just as rigidly dogmatic as the academics’, but which seems, worryingly, to have quite another agenda. The promotion of certain ideas and the fact that the same ideas occur in several of the most high-profile books about ‘alternative Egypt’ led us to believe that there was a pre-arranged, orchestrated move to create a new belief system.
As this investigation proceeds and we carefully strip away the layers of false extrapolation and strange affiliations, a much wider conspiracy is revealed. This extends well beyond the confines of Egyptology — Old or New — and involves several intelligence agencies, including the CIA and Britain’s MI5, occult groups and even some of the world’s top scientists. This extraordinary conspiracy centres upon the creation of the expectation of imminent, quasireligious revelations connected with ancient Egypt, cynically exploiting the spiritual hunger and craving for miracles of the Western world. This is not some minor social experiment, but in effect a large-scale campaign that takes many forms and uses many different religious, spiritual, New Age - and even political — masks. Honed by decades of intensive, and often less than ethical, intelligence experience, this conspiracy is, in our view, the most insidious yet dangerous assault on the collective free will of the West. Those at the heart of this plot care little for either the Egyptian mysteries or the spiritually bereft: all they care about is power and control.
Testament of the pyramids
No first visit to Paris is complete without a trip to the top of the Eiffel Tower, where, windblown but triumphant, one can enjoy a seemingly limitless view over one of the most beautiful cities on Earth. This experience is useful when putting another - even more famous — landmark into context: the Great Pyramid of Giza. Until the Eiffel Tower was built in the last years of the nineteenth century, the ancient Egyptian wonder of the world was the tallest building humanity had ever known. But while every nut and bolt of the iron giant of Paris can be traced to its origins, and all its parts could be easily reassembled today, the same is not true of the Great Pyramid. No one knows how it was built, although many claim they do. While everyone knows the reason why the Eiffel Tower was built, no one knows the true purpose of the pyramids.
Reams of paper and seas of ink have been used in attempts to convey the sheer scale of the Great Pyramid, but nothing can prepare the individual for the moment he or she sees it for the first time. Other famous monuments may disappoint: Stonehenge, perhaps, does not quite justify the tour-guide hype. The Great Pyramid of Giza always exceeds expectations.
One illusion, however, is very quickly shattered. Somehow a romantic notion prevails that the Giza complex - the three most famous pyramids and the Sphinx, along with their attendant temples and causeways — lies in the middle of the desert and that one has to be a cross between Indiana Jones and Lawrence of Arabia in order to get there. The monuments of Giza are in fact ten minutes’ walk from the populous suburb of Cairo of the same name. It can come as a shock to find the Great Pyramid towering over a hotel swimming pool. There are few more dramatic, and somehow unsettling, backdrops to poolside relaxation.
The Great Pyramid is profoundly unsettling in many ways, not least because of its sheer scale. Made of 2.5 million limestone blocks, each with an average weight of 2.5 tons, this immense structure covers an area of over 53,000 square yards at its base, with a perimeter of over half a mile. It is 481 feet high, a great height, as those who ill advisedly (and illegally) climb up it can testify. Although its roughly stepped sides now appear to invite an arduous scramble to the summit, originally this was impossible, as the whole pyramid was covered in a smooth, polished limestone cladding.
The Great Pyramid is aligned to the cardinal points of the compass with an amazing — and aesthetically unnecessary — degree of accuracy. (There is an error of only about 5 inches in the north — south alignment, and one of just over 2 inches from east to west.) The same incredible accuracy applies to the monument as a whole: the length of the sides at its base differ by less than 8 inches (20.5 cm) between the shortest and longest sides, and the accuracy of the right-angled comers is near-perfect.1 There are many other famous examples of awesome sophistication in the construction and location of the Great Pyramid. These include the fact that it is situated almost exactly on the geodetically significant latitude of 30 degrees, as well as the use in its design of advanced geometric concepts such as pi and phi (which are, officially, supposed to have been unknown to the ancient Egyptians). For orthodox Egyptologists these facts, while undeniable, can only be put down to coincidence.2
Elsewhere in the Giza complex, other, less famous, examples of the builders’ art equally give one pause. Most tourists only ever use the curious, now roofless, building known as the Valley Temple, which l
ies on the southern side of the Sphinx enclosure, as a route to the Sphinx. This is a pity, as it is well worth serious examination itself. Limestone blocks dwarf even those used in the construction of the Great Pyramid, some weighing as much as 200 tons and measuring up to 9 metres in length. (These blocks were taken from the Sphinx enclosure when it was originally hollowed out.) The inner walls and upright square pillars of the interior of the temple are made of granite - again, some weighing over 200 tons. But not until the 1970s were cranes built that could lift a weight of even just 100 tons - half the weight of the largest blocks in the Valley Temple.3 How did the ancient Egyptians lift them over three millennia ago?
There is something other than sheer scale involved in the workmanship of the Valley Temple. There are, by modern standards, other virtually ‘impossible’ flourishes in the setting of one stone next to another. For example, at its corners, instead of having two separate stones fitting together to form the right angles, just one massive block has been cut to turn the corner, sometimes by the ludicrously tiny amount of just a couple of inches, with the next stone specifically trimmed to fit the remaining space, and so on. This is all the more incredible when you realise that the stones were all cut to fit when actually in place. It follows the same principle as that of dry-stone walling, used by many rural peoples over the centuries and generally thought to require a fair degree of eye-to-hand skill. But such wall building always used small stones, because they usually had to fit relatively easily into the wall-maker’s hand. By contrast, the stones of the Valley Temple, as we have seen, would still defy the lifting powers of the greatest cranes of the modern world, let alone be easily trimmed to go round comers when in place. So how did the ancient Egyptians manipulate such massive stones? And why did they choose what has to be the most complicated and unnecessarily difficult method they could possibly find? As we toured the Valley Temple, the thought that came irresistibly to mind was that these builders were showing off ...
The granite blocks themselves present a mystery. Not only is the interior of the Valley Temple made of granite, but so is part of the inside of the Great Pyramid. The King’s Chamber is lined with it. The local stone was limestone, so the giant granite blocks had to be transferred from Aswan, about 600 miles to the south of Cairo, then hoisted into place, sometimes being positioned as lintels across the top of upright granite blocks.
There are other examples of unnecessary, even apparently absurd, difficulties encountered by the early builders. At the position of Khafra’s (the ‘Second’) Pyramid, a level base had to be created on a slightly sloping section of the plateau. This entailed the cutting of a ‘step’ into the rock of the rise and building up the lower part of the slope with limestone blocks to make a level platform. Had the pyramid been built just a few hundred metres to the west, it would have been on level ground to begin with.4 Clearly the ancient Egyptians either liked to make things as difficult as possible for themselves, or there was a very important reason why the Second Pyramid should occupy exactly that position in relation to the first.
The mysteries of the external structure of the Giza monuments leap to the visitor’s startled eye, but the inside of the Great Pyramid is even more baffling. What strikes the first-time visitor immediately is how strangely cramped the passages and entrances to the chambers are, and how difficult it is for even relatively small adults to scrape through. You have to duck down for long stretches of the Ascending Passage to reach the awe-inspiring Grand Gallery, which leads to the King’s Chamber, and then you must bend double to get through the immediate entrance, the antechamber. And, before wooden slats were incorporated into the Grand Gallery in the modern era to enable visitors to achieve a foothold, originally there was only a massive smooth stone surface stretching upwards and out of sight. The Great Pyramid is hardly visitor-friendly now; the gods alone know what kind of superhuman agility was required to move around inside it millennia ago.
We are told that the Great Pyramid, like its companions at Giza — and every other Egyptian pyramid — was built as a tomb for a pharaoh: this is, according to mainstream Egyptologists, ‘fact’. Unfortunately, as all pyramidiots gleefully point out, no evidence of any human burial has ever been found in any pyramid. One can cite the depredations of grave robbers as much as one likes, but in the ‘unfinished’ step pyramid attributed to Sekhemket at Saqqara the sarcophagus was found not only intact but also sealed — and when opened was revealed to be empty.5 And most famously, no signs of human burial have ever been found in the Great Pyramid nor in its two companion pyramids at Giza. Remains were found in the sarcophagus in Khafra’s - the Second Pyramid — but they turned out to belong to a bull.6 The Bent Pyramid at Dahshur contained a dismembered owl and the skeletons of five bats in a box, but nothing of human origin.7 Clearly, the pyramids were not tombs, but the fact remains that — although many theories have been put forward — no one knows why the pyramids were built, nor even how they were built. (Bizarre though it may seem, the mysteries of the pyramids are not favourites with academic Egyptologists. As Vivian Davies of the British Museum has said: ‘I must confess I’ve never been somebody fascinated with the pyramids.’8 A similar position is adopted by many of his colleagues.)
The old idea that the pharaohs used thousands of slaves to haul the vast slabs of rock through the desert and manoeuvre them into place through sheer brute force has been shown to be extremely unlikely. Recent archaeological evidence has indicated that the workers were free men who willingly gave up some of their time to assist in the building and were housed in huge camps. The logistics of feeding and watering this army of volunteer workers must have been a nightmare, especially as they were technically, at least, free to leave if they wanted to. There is also the problem of how any number of even the strongest and most willing of men could have manoeuvred those massive stone slabs into place with such finesse.
The Great Pyramid slopes inwards towards the apex at an angle of about 52 degrees and its summit is nearly 500 feet from the ground. The imagination baulks at the problem of how these ‘primitive’ people did it. They must have had scaffolding that was not only extraordinarily strong, but also adjustable. After all, it would have had to allow for the intricate and physically tough work needed to manoeuvre each mighty stone in place, course by course, higher and higher, all the while sloping inwards to accommodate the gradient. Such scaffolding would also have had to be almost supernaturally strong to sustain the weight of at least one 2.5-ton block of stone, as well as workers and their tools. Academics favour the theory that the pyramids were erected through the construction of giant ramps — made of clay bricks, perhaps - so that the blocks could be dragged into position, after which the ramps were demolished. Once again, however, there is the problem of the inwardly sloping walls and the tiny apex - how would you build adjustable ramps to allow for the gradient? After all, a fixed ramp might work for the first few stone courses, but very soon the gradient would create a widening gap between the ramp and the pyramid wall, hardly the best, or safest, way to manipulate huge blocks of stone. If you had somehow managed to build any part of the side of a pyramid in this way, by the time you came close to the apex there would be a gap of several feet between your fixed ramp and the stonework. What did they do — throw the stones across? Academics have suggested that, in order to overcome this problem, the Egyptians built serial ramps, each inclining further inwards to accommodate the gradient, but such ramps would need to have started many miles away in order to have gentle enough inclines for men to be able to drag stones up them.
Recently, American Egyptologist Mark Lehner built a scale model of a true pyramid on the Giza plateau for a television series called Secrets of Lost Empires, a BBC/NOVA[WGBH-Boston coproduction that required teams of experts to reproduce the achievements of ancient cultures — at least, in miniature. Given just three weeks, different teams had to build a pyramid, erect a Stonehenge monolith or repair a remote Incan wall. If we were to believe their own publicity, they very largely succeeded, al
though, certainly in the case of Mark Lehner’s team, their ‘success’ was extremely limited. For a start, they were not required to quarry and move the stone blocks using the soft copper tools that (allegedly) were all that the Egyptians had. If the team could not have used modern methods to cut and move the stones to the building site at Giza, no doubt the Millennium would have come and gone before they hacked out a single stone.
Once they had their stones on site, they had to resort to the putative ‘primitive’ methods of the original builders. Lehner’s team, which included local Egyptian labourers, cut 186 limestone blocks, each weighing up to 6,000 lbs — not, note, 2.5 tons - then manoeuvred them into position, swearing and sweating, using brute force, levers, ropes and water as a lubricant. The resulting pyramid, with its perfect gradient of 52 degrees, was clad with shaped facing blocks, then topped with a limestone pyramidion. Lehner, bursting with pride, announced that ‘this limited experience made it abundantly clear that the pyramids are very human monuments, created through long experience and tremendous skill, but without any kind of secret sophistication’.
That is all well and good, until it is realised that Lehner’s Pyramid was very much a miniature version of the real thing — not much higher than a tall man with upraised arms. In fact, this stone Wendy House would perch comfortably on the very top of the Great Pyramid. Building a structure where you can easily manoeuvre large stones, if necessary by dragging them out on to the ground and starting again, is wildly different from constructing what was - until recently - the tallest building in the world, where there would have been no room for manoeuvre beyond the first few stone courses.
The Stargate Conspiracy Page 3
