Schoch, however, disagrees, writing: ‘I think that his [West’s] estimation of the age of the Sphinx ... is an exaggeration.’50
Graham Hancock, also picking up on Schoch’s work, writes in Fingerprints of the Gods: ‘Indeed, for two or three thousand years before and about a thousand years after 10,500 BC it rained and rained and rained.’51 This assertion has become as enshrined as fact for the New Egyptology as much as Khafra building the Sphinx is fact for academic Egyptologists, which makes it all the more intriguing to discover that there was no eleventh-millennium BCE wet period. Significantly, Hancock gives no source and no evidence for his assertion, while on the other hand there is abundant evidence that there was no such wet period.52 Dr Sarah O‘Mara of Drylands Research at Sheffield University - the world authority on the climate of deserts, past and present - states that up to 8000 BCE: ’we have no evidence that any humans were living in this area [Egypt]. This was an area that was very dry, very cold. It was the time of the last Ice Age.‘53 That Ice Age, which had begun around 20,000 BCE, ended in 8000 BCE, ushering in a period that fluctuated between wetter and drier periods. And Michael Rice, in his book Egypt’s Making, writes: ‘It is probable that the Valley floor could not really have supported a substantial human civilization until about 10,000 years ago [i.e. around 8000 BCE].’54
The climate at the time of the Old Kingdom, when the pyramids were built, was considerably wetter than it is today. In fact, as late as 2500 BCE, when the Great Pyramid was probably built, the annual rainfall in Egypt was the same as parts of England today.55 Between 7000 and 5000 BCE, the climate of Egypt was very wet. Then, after 5000 BCE, the annual rainfall began to decline steadily until shortly after 2500 BCE, when the climate stabilised into its current pattern. The height of the Nile floods declined dramatically between 3100 and 2700 BCE, and this may have been the very reason for the emergence of Egyptian civilisation, as before that time the floods had been too high to sustain a large population on the Valley floor. As Michael Hoffman, the authority on pre-dynastic Egypt says: ‘For a time between 7000 and 2500 BC the deserts bloomed.’56
It has also been suggested - by Robert Temple among others57 — that the water erosion could have been caused by the Sphinx enclosure being filled with water up to the Sphinx’s neck to make a sacred pool. However, Schoch was perfectly specific: the erosion results from running water — rain, not a static body of water.
Schoch’s work demonstrates convincingly that the Sphinx really is older than mainstream Egyptologists claim, perhaps dating back as far as 7000 BCE. But even that seems to fall short for West and Hancock, who appear to want to push it back further - specifically to 10,500 BCE. This is certainly something of a date with destiny for those researchers, and one that they, and their colleagues, seem to us to be doing their utmost to make us believe in. But why?
As above, so below?
Another recent theory to catch the public imagination is that of Robert Bauval, who was born in Alexandria in Egypt of Belgian parents. He has been interested in ancient Egyptian culture — and specifically the pyramids - for most of his life.
In 1994 he and Adrian Gilbert produced The Orion Mystery. Its main feature was Bauval’s theory that the three pyramids of Giza were designed and built to represent the three stars of the Belt of Orion. The fact that the three structures mimic the position of the stars of Orion’s Belt, once pointed out by Bauval and Gilbert, is indeed evident - but is that really what the builders intended? Those authors dedicate most of The Orion Mystery to establishing the case that it was.
The match between the pyramids and stars is not perfect, though. If the stars are superimposed on the ground plan of the pyramids, it can be seen immediately that the correlation is only approximate. If the two brightest stars are positioned over the Great Pyramid and Khafra’s Pyramid, then the third star fails to align with the smallest, Menkaura’s Pyramid. (In fact, the only time that all three pyramids line up perfectly with the stars is in graphics used in Hancock/Bauval television programmes.) Whether you accept the Orion/Giza correlation depends on the level of accuracy you expect from the pyramid builders.
When Bauval tries to make other pyramids fit his theory, he has even less success. For example, in The Orion Mystery he brings in the pyramids at Abu Roash, to the south of Giza, and Zawiyet-el-Aryan, to the north (neither, incidentally, were ever completed). He maintains that they correspond with other stars in Orion.58 However, they do not match up very persuasively. This is not, admittedly, a major problem. We cannot be certain that the architects of this grand design intended to map out the whole of Orion on the ground, or even that they recognised the constellation in the way we do today; it may have been just the three stars of the Belt that they mirrored at Giza.
Apparent confirmation of Bauval’s theory of the Giza/Orion’s Belt correlation comes from the alignments of the four small shafts running from the two main chambers - the so-called King’s and Queen’s Chambers - within the Great Pyramid, two from each, one to the north and one to the south in each case. These shafts run straight into the walls, before angling upwards through the main body of the pyramid. They are very small, only a little more than 8 inches (20 cm) square. Those in the King’s Chamber (the upper one) run diagonally up through the massive blocks of stone, right through the walls to the outside, which has given rise to their official designation as air shafts. Those running from the Queen’s Chamber are rather stranger, since they neither exit into the open air on the outside, nor open into the chamber itself. They were discovered behind the walls of the chamber in 1872.
A cross-section of the Great Pyramid showing the main
passages and features.
It has been recognised since the early 1960s that these shafts may have been designed to point towards certain stars significant to the ancient Egyptians.59 The shaft going north from the King’s Chamber, for example, appears to have been ‘targeted’ on the star Thuban, in the constellation of Draconis, the northern pole star in the Pyramid Age. It has also been suggested that the southern shaft that runs from the King’s Chamber was targeted on the stars of Orion’s Belt. If so, this would add support to the idea that the pyramids were built to represent them. Bauval calculated that, around 2475 BCE, the southern King’s Chamber shaft would have aligned with the lowest and brightest star of Orion’s Belt, Al Nitak.60
In recent years huge controversy has centred on discoveries - and rumours of discoveries - on the Giza plateau, and especially within the Great Pyramid. Certainly the excitement generated in 1993 with the discovery of a tiny door in the Great Pyramid shows no signs of abating. The Internet rumour machine is still very busy spinning tales, which may or may not be founded in fact. In March 1993 a German engineer, Rudolf Gantenbrink, sent a robot fitted with a video camera from the Queen’s Chamber into both shafts. Then, now famously, the robot — called Upuaut 2 (after the ancient Egyptian god who was ‘Opener of the Way’) — encountered what appeared to be a very small door blocking the shaft, complete with handles and an intriguing gap beneath. A door of any size implies that something lies behind it. What could it be? Imaginations have been fevered ever since, but the general consensus is that some kind of chamber lies behind ‘Gantenbrink’s Door’. At the time of writing — nearly six years after Gantenbrink’s discovery - we are still waiting to find out where that door leads.
Gantenbrink’s data had another use: it was seized upon by Robert Bauval, who saw it as a vindication of his theory, developed in the late 1980s, that the southern shaft from the Queen’s Chamber was designed to align with Sirius. From the angle of the shaft he could now calculate where it had been pointing when the pyramid was built. From these new alignments, Bauval estimated that it had been constructed around 2450 BCE.61 Ironically, this would make it about a century younger than mainstream Egyptologists think, erring in the wrong direction for the New Orthodoxy. (Recent carbon dating results tend to indicate that the Great Pyramid is even older, perhaps by as much as four centuries. 62) Bauval was so en
thusiastic about Gantenbrink’s discovery that he took it upon himself to make the announcement to the world’s media in early April 1993.63
However, some of Bauval’s assumptions are open to question. For example, he presents a very circular argument that uses the stellar alignments of the shafts to prove the date of the Great Pyramid, but also relies on this date to prove that the shafts have stellar alignments. There is also an anomaly concerning the dates indicated by the two shafts: the Queen’s Chamber shaft would (according to Bauval’s calculations) have been perfectly aligned with Sirius around 2400 BCE, whereas the higher King’s Chamber shaft was perfectly aligned with Al Nitak some seventy-five years earlier. It was therefore impossible for both shafts to have been pointing to ‘their’ stars at the same time. But then perhaps we — and Robert Bauval — are expecting the ancient Egyptians to have been overprecise. After all, seventy-five years would have meant a mere fraction of a degree difference in alignment. All in all, Bauval’s ideas are certainly bold and challenging, though we have serious reservations about their wider implications.
Bauval’s theory has become one of the standard lines of the New Egyptology. Rarely is it questioned among readers or researchers in this field. However, one outspoken critic is none other than Rudolf Gantenbrink himself, who attacks Bauval for using his data to support his theory of alignments with Sirius, a theory that, in any case, Gantenbrink rejects. In August 1998 he told us:
His theories are pure nonsense, and they are largely disproved. He uses the wrong data for the angle of the shafts ... and the astronomical data are even more hazardous. There is no solid academic base for his theories whatsoever.64
Gantenbrink points out that the concept that the shafts were intended to align with any star depends on them being straight, but they only appear to be so when the Great Pyramid is shown in a north-south cross-section. In fact, all the shafts have bends from left to right - that is, from east to west. In the case of the two shafts running from the King’s Chamber, neither end (in the chamber and outside) is in line with the other. (The shafts from the Queen’s Chamber do not reach the exterior of the pyramid.)
Bauval’s theory requires the shafts to be as straight as rulers, directed at a specific point in the sky. If, as is the case, the shafts have kinks in them, it seems unlikely that they would have been intended to point at any particular heavenly body. As Gantenbrink told us: ‘So any star alignment ... could only work on the side view, but never in three-dimensional reality.’ Gantenbrink’s somewhat dramatic conclusion based on his review of the flaws in Bauval’s data is that ‘The star alignment is simply a HOAX!’
Bauval’s announcement to the world’s media of the discovery of the door also attracts comment from Gantenbrink. Certainly, Bauval completely sidestepped the usual protocol. The news should never have been released without the permission of the people for whom Gantenbrink was working at the time, the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo and the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. Bauval gives as his reason for such unilateral action his great frustration with the dilatoriness of the Egyptian and German authorities in announcing the discovery. In his view, they were dragging their feet, and he felt that people should know — yet his first approach to the media was just fourteen days after Gantenbrink made his discovery! What was the real reason for Bauval’s haste in making the announcement to the world?
Gantenbrink has no doubts about Bauval’s motivation. He told us: ‘This was a clever PR campaign. Without my discovery, we simply would not know a guy called Robert Bauval.’ Gantenbrink goes further: he even blames Bauval’s premature and unauthorised release of his news to the press for the Egyptian authorities’ refusal to allow him to continue his work in the Great Pyramid.
We had been intrigued to discover that the idea that the southern shaft from the Queen’s Chamber aligned with Sirius appeared in Masonic literature dating from at least the late nineteenth century.65 At the time we were impressed. Was Bauval’s work confirmation that Freemasons have long possessed secret information about the pyramids? We put the idea that Bauval’s work would demonstrate this unexpected knowledge to Gantenbrink, who responded: ‘It would, but it doesn’t! It only indicates where Bauval got his idea from.’
The alleged alignments are only part of Bauval’s attempt to link his theory with a much more remote period of Egypt’s history. Bauval accepts that the Giza pyramids were built around 2450 BCE, more or less the time proposed by Egyptologists (who in fact say they are a century older). But he notes that the three pyramids were not a perfect match for the stars at that time: the pyramids are oriented at 45 degrees to a north-south meridian running through Giza, so for the three stars of Orion’s Belt to properly match the groundplan of Giza they should also be positioned at an angle of 45 degrees to the celestial meridian.66 This crossing of the celestial meridian occurs when the stars are exactly due south - when they are at their highest point in the sky (‘culminating’ in astronomical terminology). But Bauval noted that Orion’s Belt was not aligned at 45 degrees to the celestial meridian at the time that he believes the pyramids were built.
However, because of the precession of the equinoxes the constellations change in orientation over the course of centuries. Bauval, assuming that the builders deliberately mismatched the pyramids with the stars, decided to find out when they actually did align. He concluded that:
It is not until 10,500 BC ... — 8000 years before the ‘Pyramid Age’ - that the perfect correlation is finally achieved with the Nile mirroring the Milky Way and with the three Pyramids and the belt stars identically disposed in relation to the meridian.67
He therefore hypothesised that either the groundplan of the pyramids had been laid out at that time - even if they were not actually constructed for another 8000 years - or that the builders were trying to tell us something about the epoch of 10,500 BCE.
There are problems with this. Even Robin J. Cook, who worked with Bauval and provided the diagrams for The Orion Mystery, takes issue with his conclusions. In his The Horizon of Khufu (1996), Cook examined the same question and stated emphatically: ‘... this was not the case in 10,450 BC.’68 In fact, Cook found a correlation that did fit Orion’s Belt in the ‘Giza position’ in 2450 BCE.69 Cook disagrees that the Giza complex was intended to pinpoint the year 10,500 BCE, and it must be said unequivocally that his evidence is much more persuasive than Bauval’s. But even so, do we have to take Cook’s word for this? Unfortunately for Bauval’s tidy theory, this is very easy to double-check — when we did so, we discovered that Cook is right. Using the same astronomical computer simulation as Bauval - SkyGlobe 3.6 - we discovered that the stars of Orion’s Belt were emphatically not in the ‘Giza’ position at the spring equinox in 10,500 BCE (nor at any other time when it culminated in that epoch).70 In fact, it is very easy to tell when Orion’s Belt is at a 45 degree angle to the meridian, as at this moment Saiph — the ‘left leg’ star of Orion — is directly below Al Nitak, the most easterly (left) of the three stars of Orion’s Belt.71 In fact, for it to culminate in the ‘Giza position’ you have to go back to about 12,000 BCE — and even then, it does not culminate at the significant moment of dawn on the spring equinox.
Does this mean that Bauval merely slipped up in his calculations by 1,500 or so years? Anyone can make a mistake. And does this just mean that Bauval’s putative advanced civilisation laid out the pyramids in 12,000 BCE rather than 10,500 BCE? Tempting though it is to ascribe this ‘slip’ to human error, there is in fact much more at stake here. Once again — as with Hancock’s non-existent eleventh-millennium BCE ‘wet period’ - we find a high-profile New Egyptologist desperately trying to prove that 10,500 BCE was in some way highly significant, even when the facts indicate otherwise.
While we appear to have two - apparently persuasive - independent lines of evidence, both astronomical and geological, converging on the date 10,500 BCE, both can easily be seen to be based on a distortion of the facts. Bauval reveals his enthusiastic belief that the t
wo lines of research reinforce each other in the television documentary The Mysterious Origins of Man (1996) in which he states:
We’re finding that the astronomy is leading us to conclude that the Sphinx was erected in 10,500 BC, and this matches exactly with the ideas that have been developed in the geological analysis of the Sphinx. So there are two hard sciences now indicating that the Sphinx could be very old, and going back to the 11th millennium BC.
A ground plan of the Giza pyramids. They lie at approximately 45
degrees to the north-south meridian.
Opposite: Above — The culmination of the constellation of Orion in
10,500 BCE. Note that the stars of Orion’s Belt are not in the ‘Giza
position’. Below — Orion as it should appear in the ‘Giza position’. This
has not happened since approximately 12,000 BCE.
We have seen that in fact the astronomy does no such thing where the pyramids are concerned, and that it provides no support for the redating of the Sphinx.
A date with destiny
In 1996 Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock teamed up to write Keeper of Genesis, which develops the argument in favour of 10,500 BCE and elaborates on its significance. Much of their hypothesis is based on astronomical correlations between the Giza complex, descriptions of celestial events in the Pyramid Texts and the sky as it would have appeared in 10,500 BCE. Having reached that key date from just two dubious lines of argument — the ‘match’ between the Giza pyramids and Orion’s Belt and the water erosion of the Sphinx from the alleged wet period of the eleventh millennium BCE — they begin to extrapolate the meaning.
The Stargate Conspiracy Page 6
