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  same Egyptologists who readily ascribed immense importance to Vyse’s

  20 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 211-12; The Great Pyramid: Your Personal Guide, p. 71.

  21 Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 96.

  22 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 35-6.

  23 Zecharia Sitchin, The Stairway To Heaven, Avon Books, New York, 1983, pp. 253-82.

  24 Ibid.

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  quarry marks were quick to downplay the significance of these other,

  contradictory, hieroglyphs, which appeared on a rectangular limestone

  stela which now stood in the Cairo Museum.25

  The Inventory Stela, as it was called, had been discovered at Giza in the

  nineteenth century by the French archaeologist Auguste Mariette. It was

  something of a bombshell because its text clearly indicated that both the

  Great Sphinx and the Great Pyramid (as well as several other structures

  on the plateau) were already in existence long before Khufu came to the

  throne. The inscription also referred to Isis as the ‘Mistress of the

  Pyramid’, implying that the monument had been dedicated to the

  goddess of magic and not to Khufu at all. Finally, there was a strong

  suggestion that Khufu’s pyramid might have been one of the three

  subsidiary structures alongside the Great Pyramid’s eastern flank.26

  All this looked like damaging evidence against the orthodox chronology

  of Ancient Egypt. It also challenged the consensus view that the Giza

  pyramids had been built as tombs and only as only. However, rather than

  investigating the anachronistic statements in the Inventory Stela,

  Egyptologists chose to devalue them. In the words of the influential

  American scholar James Henry Breasted, ‘These references would be of

  the highest importance if the stela were contemporaneous with Khufu;

  but the orthographic evidences of its late date are entirely conclusive ...’27

  Breasted meant that the nature of the hieroglyphic writing system used

  in he inscription was not consistent with that used in the Fourth Dynasty

  but belonged to a more recent epoch: All Egyptologists concurred with

  this analysis and the final judgement, still accepted today, was that the

  stela had been carved in the Twenty-First Dynasty, about 1500 years after

  Khufu’s reign, and was therefore to be regarded as a work of historical

  fiction.28

  Thus, citing orthographic evidence, an entire academic discipline found

  reason to ignore the boat-rocking implications of the Inventory Stela and

  at no time gave proper consideration to the possibility that it could have

  been based upon a genuine Fourth Dynasty inscription (just as the New

  English Bible, for example, is based on a much older original). Exactly the

  same scholars, however, had accepted the authenticity of a set of dubious

  ‘quarry marks’ without demur, turning a blind eye to their orthographic

  and other peculiarities.

  Why the double standard? Could it have been because the information

  contained in the ‘quarry marks’ conformed strictly to orthodox opinion

  that the Great Pyramid had been built as a tomb for Khufu? whereas the

  25 James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt: Historical Documents from the

  Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest, reprinted by Histories and Mysteries of Man Ltd.,

  London, 1988, pp. 83-5.

  26 Ibid., p. 85.

  27 Ibid., p. 84.

  28 Ibid., and Travellers Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 139.

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  information in the Inventory Stela contradicted that opinion?

  Overview

  By seven in the morning Santha and I had walked far out into the desert

  to the south-west of the Giza pyramids and had made ourselves

  comfortable in the lee of a huge dune that offered an unobstructed

  panorama over the entire site.

  The date, 16 March, was just a few days away from the Spring Equinox,

  one of the two occasions in the year when the sun rose precisely due east

  of wherever you stood in the world. Ticking out the days like the pointer

  of a giant metronome, it had bisected the horizon this morning at a point

  a hair’s breadth south of due east and had already climbed high enough

  to shrug off the Nile mists which clung like a shroud to much of the city

  of Cairo.

  Khufu, Khafre, Menkaure ... Cheops, Chephren, Mycerinus. Whether you

  called them by their Egyptian or their Greek names, there was no doubt

  that the three famous pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty had been

  commemorated by the most splendid, the most honourable, the most

  beautiful and the most enormous monuments ever seen anywhere in the

  world. Moreover, it was clear that these pharaohs must indeed have been

  closely associated with the monuments, not only because of the folklore

  passed on by Herodotus (which surely had some basis in fact) but

  because inscriptions and references to Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure had

  been found in moderate quantities, outside the three major pyramids, at

  several different parts of the Giza necropolis. Such finds had been made

  consistently in and around the six subsidiary pyramids, three of which lay

  to the east of the Great Pyramid and the other three to the south of the

  Menkaure Pyramid.

  Since much of this external evidence was ambiguous and uncertain, I

  found it difficult to understand why the Egyptologists were happy to go

  on citing it as confirmation of the ‘tombs and tombs only’ theory.

  The problem was that this same evidence was capable of supporting—

  as equally valid—a number of different and mutually contradictory

  interpretations. To give just one example, the ‘close association’

  observed between the three great pyramids and the three Fourth Dynasty

  pharaohs could indeed have come about because these pharaohs had

  built the pyramids as their tombs. But it could also have come about if

  the gigantic monuments of the Giza plateau had been standing long

  before the dawn of the historical civilization known as Dynastic Egypt. In

  that case, it was only necessary to assume that in due course Khufu,

  Khafre and Menkaure had come along and built a number of the

  subsidiary structures around the three older pyramids—something that

  they would have had every reason to do because in this way they could

  have appropriated the high prestige of the original anonymous

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  monuments (and would, almost certainly, be viewed by posterity as their

  builders).

  There were other possibilities too. The point was, however, that the

  evidence for exactly who had built which great pyramid, when and for

  what purpose was far too thin on the ground to justify the dogmatism of

  the orthodox ‘tombs and tombs only’ theory. In all honesty, it was not

  clear who built the pyramids. It was not clear in what epoch they had

  been built. And it was not at all clear what their function had been.

  For all these reasons they were surrounded by a wonderful,

  impenetrable air of mystery and as I gazed down at them out of the

  desert they seemed to march towards me across the dunes ...
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  Chapter 36

  Anomalies

  Viewed from our vantage point in the desert south west of the Giza

  necropolis, the site plan of the three great pyramids seemed majestic but

  bizarre.

  Menkaure’s pyramid was closest to us, with Khafre’s and Khufu’s

  monuments behind it to the north-east. These two were situated along a

  near perfect diagonal—a straight line connecting the south-western and

  north-eastern corners of the pyramid of Khafre would, if extended to the

  north-east, also pass through the south-western and north-eastern

  corners of the Great Pyramid. This, presumably, was not an accident.

  From where we sat, however, it was easy to see that if the same

  imaginary straight line was extended to the south-west it would

  completely miss the Third Pyramid, the entire body of which was offset to

  the east of the principal diagonal.

  Egyptologists refused to recognize any anomaly in this. Why should

  they? As far as they were concerned there was no site plan at Giza. The

  pyramids were tombs and tombs only, built for three different pharaohs

  over a period of about seventy-five years.1 It made sense to assume that

  each ruler would have sought to express his own personality and

  idiosyncrasies through his monument, and this was probably why

  Menkaure had ‘stepped out of line’.

  The Egyptologists were wrong. Though I was unaware of it that March

  morning in 1993, a breakthrough had been made proving beyond doubt

  that the necropolis did have an overall site plan, which dictated the exact

  positioning of the three pyramids not only in relation to one another but

  in relation to the River Nile a few kilometres east of the Giza plateau. With

  eerie fidelity, this immense and ambitious layout modelled a celestial

  phenomenon2—which was perhaps why Egyptologists (who pride

  themselves on looking exclusively at the ground beneath their feet) had

  failed to spot it. On a truly giant scale, as we see in later chapters, it also

  reflected the same obsessive concern with orientations and dimensions

  demonstrated in each of the monuments.

  A singular oppression ...

  Giza, Egypt, 16 March 1993, 8 a.m.

  At a little over 200 feet tall (and with a side length at the base of 356

  1 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.

  2 The Orion Mystery.

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  feet) the Third Pyramid was less than half the height and well under half

  the mass of the Great Pyramid. Nevertheless, it possessed a stunning and

  imposing majesty of its own. As we stepped out of the desert sunlight

  and into its huge geometrical shadow, I remembered what the Iraqi writer

  Abdul Latif had said about it when he had visited it in the twelfth century:

  ‘It appears small compared with the other two; but viewed at a short

  distance and to the exclusion of these, it excites in the imagination a

  singular oppression and cannot be contemplated without painfully

  affecting the sight ...’3

  The lower sixteen courses of the monument were still cased, as they

  had been since the beginning, with facing blocks quarried out of red

  granite (‘so extremely hard’, in Abdul Latif s words, ‘that iron takes a

  long time, with difficulty, to make an impression on it’).4 Some of the

  blocks were very large; they were also closely and cunningly fitted

  together in a complex interlocking jigsaw-puzzle pattern strongly

  reminiscent of the cyclopean masonry at Cuzco, Machu Picchu and other

  locations in far-off Peru.

  As was normal, the entrance to the Third Pyramid was situated in its

  northern face well above the ground. From here, at an angle of 26° 2’, a

  descending corridor lanced arrow-straight down into the darkness.5

  Oriented exactly north to south, this corridor was rectangular in section

  and so cramped that we had to bend almost double to fit into it. Where it

  passed through the masonry of the monument its ceiling and walls

  consisted of well-fitted granite blocks. More surprisingly, these continued

  for some distance below ground level.

  At about seventy feet from the entrance, the corridor levelled off and

  opened out into a passageway where we could stand up. This led into a

  small ante-chamber with carved panelling and grooves cut into its walls,

  apparently to take portcullis slabs. Reaching the end of the chamber, we

  had to crouch again to enter another corridor. Bent double, we proceeded

  south for about forty feet before reaching the first of the three main

  burial chambers—if burial chambers they were.

  These sombre, soundless rooms were all hewn out of solid bedrock.

  The one that we stood in was rectangular in plan and oriented east to

  west. Measuring about 30 feet long x 15 wide x 15 high, it had a flat

  ceiling and a complex internal structure with a large, irregular hole in its

  western wall leading into a dark, cave-like space beyond. There was also

  an opening near the centre of the floor which gave access to a ramp,

  sloping westwards, leading down to even deeper levels. We descended

  the ramp. It terminated in a short, horizontal passage to the right of

  which, entered through a narrow doorway, lay a small empty chamber,

  Six cells, like the sleeping quarters of medieval monks, had been hewn

  3 Abdul Latif, The Eastern Key, cited in Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 126.

  4 Ibid.

  5 Blue Guide: Egypt, A & C Black, London, 1988, p. 433.

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  out of its walls: four on the eastern side and two to the north. These were

  presumed by Egyptologists to have functioned as ‘magazines ... for

  storing objects which the dead king wished to have close to his body.’6

  Coming out of this chamber, we turned right again, back into the

  horizontal passage. At its end lay another empty chamber,7 the design of

  which is unique among the pyramids of Egypt. Some twelve feet long by

  eight wide, and oriented north to south, its walls and extensively broken

  and damaged floor were fashioned out of a peculiarly dense, chocolatecoloured granite which seemed to absorb light and sound waves. Its

  ceiling consisted of eighteen huge slabs of the same material, nine on

  each side, laid in facing gables. Because they had had been hollowed

  from below to form a markedly concave surface, the effect of these great

  monoliths was of a perfect barrel vault, much as one might expect to find

  in the crypt of a Romanesque cathedral.

  Retracing our steps, we left the lower chambers and walked back up the

  ramp to the large, flat-roofed, rock-hewn room above. Passing through

  the ragged aperture in its western wall, we found ourselves looking

  directly at the upper sides of the eighteen slabs which formed the ceiling

  of the chamber below. From this perspective their true form as a pointed

  gable was immediately apparent. What was less clear was how they had

  been brought in here in the first place, let alone laid so perfectly in

  position. Each one must have weighed many tons, heavy enough to have

&nbsp
; made them extremely difficult to handle under any circumstances. And

  these were no ordinary circumstances. As though they had set out

  deliberately to make things more complicated for themselves (or perhaps

  because they found such tasks simple?) the pyramid builders had

  disdained to provide an adequate working area between the slabs and the

  bedrock above them. By crawling into the cavity, I was able to establish

  that the clearance varied from approximately two feet at the southern end

  to just a few inches at the northern end. In such a restricted space there

  was no possibility that the monoliths could have been lowered into

  position. Logically, therefore, they must have been raised from the

  chamber floor, but how had that been done? The chamber was so small

  that only a few men could have worked inside it at any one time—too few

  to have had the muscle-power to lift the slabs by brute force. Pulleys were

  not supposed to have existed in the Pyramid Age8 (even if they had, there

  would have been insufficient room to set up block-and-tackle). Had some

  unknown system of levers been used? Or might there be more substance

  than scholars realized to the Ancient Egyptian legends that spoke of huge

  6 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 127.

  7 It was in this chamber that Vyse found the intrusive burial (of bones and a wooden

  coffin lid) referred to in Chapter Thirty-Five. The basalt coffin where he also found (later

  lost at sea) is believed to have been part of the same intrusive burial and to have not

  been older than the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. See, for example, Blue Guide, Egypt, p. 433.

  8 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 220.

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  stones being effortlessly levitated by priests or magicians through the

  utterance of ‘words of power’?9

  Not for the first time when confronted by the mysteries of the pyramids

  I knew that I was looking at an impossible engineering feat which had

  nevertheless been carried out to astonishingly high and precise

  standards. Moreover, if Egyptologists were to be believed, the

  construction work had supposedly been undertaken at the dawn of

  human civilization by a people who had not accumulated any experience

  of massive construction projects.

  This was, of course, a startling cultural paradox, and one for to which

  no adequate explanation had ever been offered by an orthodox academic.