the diagonals running from the pyramid’s apex to its north-eastern and
north-western corners were extended (forming lines on the map running
north-east and northwest until they reached the Mediterranean), the
triangle thus formed would neatly encapsulate the entire Delta area.3
Let us now return to our map, which also incorporates a triangle
representing the Delta. Its other main components are the three parallel
meridians. The eastern meridian is at longitude 32° 38’ east—the official
eastern border of Ancient Egypt from the beginning of dynastic times.
The western meridian is at longitude 29° 50’ east, the official western
border of ancient Egypt. The central meridian is at longitude 31° 14’ east,
exactly midway between the other two (1° 24’ away from each).4
What we now have is a representation of a strip on the surface of planet
earth that is exactly 2° 48’ wide. How long is this strip? Ancient Egypt’s
‘official’ northern and southern borders (which bore no more relationship
to settlement patterns than the official eastern and western boundaries)
are marked by the horizontal lines at the top and bottom of the map and
are located respectively at 31° 06’ north and 24° 06’ north.5 The northern
border, 31° 06’ north, joins the two outer ends of the estuary of the Nile.
The southern border, 24° 06’ N, marks the precise latitude of the island
1 Collins English Dictionary, p. 608.
2 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 38. Much of the material in this chapter is based
directly on the work of Peter Tompkins and of Professor Livio Catullo Stecchini.
3 Ibid., p. 46.
4 Ibid., p. 181.
5 Ibid., p. 299.
415
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
of Elephantine at Aswan (Seyne) where an important astronomical and
solar observatory was located throughout known Egyptian history.6 It
seems, that this archaic land, sacred since time began—the creation and
habitation of the gods—was originally conceived of as a geometric
construct exactly seven terrestrial degrees in length.
Within this construct, the Great Pyramid appears to have been carefully
sited as a geodetic marker for the apex of the Delta. The latter, which we
have indicated on our map, is located at 30° 06’ N 31° 14’ E—a point in
the middle of the Nile at the northern edge of modern Cairo. Meanwhile
the pyramid stands at latitude of 30°N (corrected for atmospheric
refraction) and at longitude 31° 09’ E, an error of just a few minutes of
terrestrial arc to the south and west. This ‘error’, however, does not
appear to have resulted from sloppiness or inaccuracy on the part of the
pyramid builders. On the contrary, a close look at the topography of the
area suggests that the explanation should be sought in the need to find a
site suitable for all the astronomical observations that had to be taken for
accurate setting-out, and with a sufficiently stable geological structure on
which to park, for ever, a six-million-ton monument almost 500 feet high
with a footprint of over thirteen acres.
The Giza plateau fits the bill on all counts: close to the apex of the
Delta, elevated above the Valley of the Nile, and equipped with an
excellent foundation of solid limestone bedrock.
Doing things by degrees
We were driving north from Luxor to Giza in the back of Mohamed
Walilli’s Peugeot 504—a journey of just over 4 degrees of longitude, i.e.,
from 25° 42’ N, to the 30th parallel. Between Asiut and El Minya, a
corridor of conflict in recent months between Islamic extremists and
Egyptian government forces, we were provided with an armed escort of
soldiers, one of whom wore plain clothes and sat in the passenger seat
beside Mohamed fondling an automatic pistol. The others, about a dozen
men armed with AK47 assault rifles, were distributed equally between
two pick-up trucks which sandwiched us front and rear.
‘Dangerous people live here,’ Mohamed had confided out of the corner
of his mouth when we had been stopped at a road-block in Asiut and
ordered to wait for our escort. Now, although obviously rattled at being
obliged to match the high speed of the escorting vehicles, he seemed to
relish the kudos of being part of an impressive convoy, lights flashing
and sirens wailing, weaving in and out of the slower traffic on the main
highway from upper to lower Egypt.
I looked out of the car window for a while at the unchanging spectacle
of the Nile, at its fertile green banks and the red haze of the deserts a few
6 Ibid., pp. 179-81.
416
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
miles away to east and west. This was Egypt, the real organic Egypt of
today and yesterday, which overlapped (but spread out far beyond) the
strange ‘official’ Egypt of the map described, a rectangular fiction exactly
seven terrestrial degrees in length.
In the nineteenth century the renowned Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt
expressed what is still the conventional wisdom of his colleagues when
he remarked, ‘One must absolutely exclude the possibility that the
ancients may have measured by degrees.’7 This was a judgement that
seemed increasingly unlikely to be tenable. Whoever they may have been,
it was obvious that the original planners and architects of the Giza
necropolis had belonged to a civilization which knew the earth to be a
sphere, knew its dimensions almost as well as we do ourselves, and had
divided it into 360 degrees, just as we do today.
The proof of this lay in the creation of a symbolic official ‘country’
exactly seven terrestrial degrees in length, and in the admirably geodetic
location and orientation to the cardinal points of the Great Pyramid.
Equally persuasive was the fact, already touched on in Chapter Twentythree, that the perimeter of the pyramid’s base stood in the relationship
2 pi to its height and that the entire monument seemed to have been
designed to serve as a map-projection— on a scale of 1:43,200—of the
northern hemisphere of our planet:
The Great Pyramid was a projection on four triangular surfaces. The apex
represented the pole and the perimeter represented the equator. This is the
reason why the perimeter is in relation 2 pi to the height.8
The Pyramid/Earth ratio
We have demonstrated the use of pi in the Pyramid9 and need not go into
this matter again; besides, the existence of the pi relationship, though
interpreted as accidental by orthodox scholars, is not contested by
them.10 But are we seriously supposed to accept that the monument could
also be a representation of the northern hemisphere of the earth
projected on flat surfaces at a scale of 1:43,200? Let us remind ourselves
of the figures.
According to the best modern estimates, based on satellite
observations, the equatorial circumference of the earth is 24,902.45
miles and its polar radius is 3949.921 miles.11 The perimeter of the Great
Pyramid’s base is 3023.16 feet and its height is 481.3949 feet.12 The
7 Cited in Ibid., p. 333.
8 See C
hapter Twenty-three, and Stecchini in Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 378.
9 See Chapter Twenty-three.
10 Accepted, for example, by Edwards, Petrie, Baines and Malek, and so on.
11 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 27:530.
12 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 87.
417
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
scaling-down, as it turns out, is not absolutely exact, but it is very near.
Moreover, when we remember the bulge at the earth’s equator (our
planet being an oblate spheroid rather than a perfect sphere), the results
achieved by the pyramid builders seem even closer to 1:43,200.
How close?
If we take the earth’s equatorial circumference, 24,902.45 miles, and
scale it down (divide it) by 43,200 we get a result of 0.5764 of a mile.
There are 5280 feet in a mile. The next step, therefore, is to multiply
0.5764 by 5280, which produces a figure of 3043.39 feet. The earth’s
equatorial circumference scaled down 43,200 times is therefore 3,043.39
feet. By comparison, as we have seen, the perimeter of the Great
Pyramid’s base is 3,023.16 feet. This represents an ‘error’ of only 20
feet—or about three-quarters of 1 per cent. Given the razor-sharp
accuracy of the pyramid builders, however (who normally worked to even
finer tolerances), the error is less likely to have resulted from mistakes in
the construction of the giant monument than in an underestimation of
our planet’s true circumference by just 163 miles, probably caused in
part by failure to take account of the equatorial bulge.
Let us now consider the earth’s polar radius of 3949.921 miles. If we
scale it down 43,200 times we get 0.0914 of a mile: 482.59 feet. The
earth’s polar radius scaled down 43,200 times is therefore 482.59 feet.
By comparison the Great Pyramid’s height is 481.3949 feet—just a foot
less than the ideal figure, an error of barely one-fifth of one per cent.
As near as makes no difference, therefore, the perimeter of the Great
Pyramid’s base is indeed 1:43,200 of the equatorial circumference of the
earth. And as near as makes no difference, the height of the Great
Pyramid above that base is indeed 1:43,200 of the polar radius of the
earth. In other words, during all the centuries of darkness experienced by
Western civilization when knowledge of our planet’s dimensions was lost
to us, all we ever needed to do to rediscover that knowledge was to
measure the height and base perimeter of the Great Pyramid and multiply
by 43,200!
How likely is this to be an ‘accident’?
The commonsense answer is ‘not very likely at all,’ since it should be
obvious to any reasonable person that what we are looking at could only
be the result of a deliberate and carefully calculated planning decision.
Commonsense, however, has never been a faculty held in high esteem by
Egyptologists, and it is therefore necessary to ask whether there is
anything else in the data which might confirm that the ratio of 143,200 is
a purposeful expression of intelligence and knowledge, rather than some
numerical fluke.
The ratio itself seems to provide that confirmation, for the simple
reason that 43,200 is not a random number (like, say, 45,000 or 47,000,
or 50,500, or 38,800). On the contrary it is one of a series of numbers,
and multiples of those numbers, which relate to the phenomenon of
418
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
precession of the equinoxes, and which have become embedded in
archaic myths all around the world. As the reader can confirm by glancing
back at Part V the basic numerals of the Pyramid/Earth ratio crop up
again and again in those myths, sometimes directly as 43,200 sometimes
as 432, as 4320, as 432,000, as 4,320,000, and so on.
What we appear to be confronted by are two remarkable propositions,
back-to-back, as though designed to reinforce one another. It is surely
remarkable enough that the Great Pyramid should be able to function as
an accurate scale-model of the northern hemisphere of planet earth. But
it is even more remarkable that the scale involved should incorporate
numbers relating precisely to one of the key planetary mechanisms of the
earth. This is the fixed and apparently eternal precession of its axis of
rotation around the pole of the ecliptic, a phenomenon which causes the
vernal point to migrate around the band of the zodiac at the rate of one
degree every 72 years, and 30 degrees (one complete zodiacal
constellation) every 2160 years. Precession through two zodiacal
constellations, or 60 degrees along the ecliptic, takes 4320 years.13
The constant repetition of these precessional numbers in ancient myths
could, perhaps, be a coincidence. Viewed in isolation, the appearance of
the precessional number 43,200 in the pyramid/earth ratio might also be
a coincidence (although the odds against this must be astronomical). But
when we find precessional numbers in both these very different media—
the ancient myths and the ancient monument—it really does strain
credulity to suppose that coincidence is all that is involved here.
Moreover, just as the Teutonic myth of Valhalla’s walls leads us to the
precessional number 432,000 by inviting us to calculate the warriors who
‘go to war with the Wolf (500 plus 40 multiplied by 800, as saw in
Chapter Thirty-three), so the Great Pyramid leads us to the precessional
number 43,200 by demonstrating through the pi relationship that it
might be a scale-model part of the earth and then by inviting us to
calculate that scale.
Matching fingerprints?
At El Minya our escort vehicles left us, though the plain-clothes soldier in
the front seat stayed with us until Cairo. We paused for a late lunch of
bread and felafel in a boisterous, noisy village, then motored north again.
Throughout all this, my thoughts remained focused on the Great
Pyramid. Obviously it was not an accident that so immense and
conspicuous a structure should occupy a key geographic and geodetic
location in a part of the world that appeared, bizarrely, to have been
conceived of and ‘geometrized’ as a rectangular, symbolic construct
exactly seven terrestrial degrees in length. But it was the pyramid’s other
13 See Part V.
419
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
function as a three-dimensional map projection of the northern
hemisphere that particularly interested me because it suggested a
‘match’ with the ancient but advanced maps of the world described in
Part I. Those maps, which made use of spherical trigonometry and a
range of sophisticated projections, had been claimed by Professor
Charles Hapgood to provide tangible, documentary evidence that an
advanced civilization with a comprehensive knowledge of the globe must
have flourished during the last Ice Age. Now here was the Great Pyramid
proving to have a cartographic function vis-à-vis the northern hemisphere
and also incorporating a sophisticated projection. As one expert
explained:
Each flat face of the Pyramid was designe
d to represent one curved quarter of the
northern hemisphere, or spherical quadrant of 90 degrees. To project a spherical
quadrant on to a flat triangle correctly, the arc, or base, of the quadrant must be
the same length as the base of the triangle, and both must have the same height.
This happens to be the case only with a cross-section or meridian bisection of the
Great Pyramid, whose slope angle gives the pi relation between height and base
...14
Was it possible that surviving copies and compilations of ancient maps—
like the Piri Reis Map, for example—might in some cases go back to
source documents produced by the same culture that skillfully
incorporated its knowledge of the globe into the dimensions of the Great
Pyramid (and indeed into the carefully geometrized dimensions of
Ancient Egypt itself)?
I could hardly forget that Charles Hapgood and his team had spent
months trying to work out where the original projection of the Piri Reis
Map had been centred. The answer they finally obtained was Egypt and
specifically Seyne (Aswan) in upper Egypt15—where, as we have seen, an
important astronomical observatory was situated at latitude 24° 06’ N,
the official southern border.
Needless to say, precise astronomical observations would have been
essential for calculations of the circumference of the earth and of latitude
positions.16 But for how long before the historical period had the Ancient
Egyptians and their ancestors been making such observations? And had
they indeed learned this skill, as they stated forthrightly in their
traditions, from the gods who had once walked among them?
Navigators in the Boat of Millions of Years
The god believed by the Ancient Egyptians to have taught the principles
of astronomy to their ancestors was Thoth: ‘He who reckons in heaven,
14 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 189.
15 Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, p. 17ff.
16 See, for example, The Shape of the World, p. 23.
420
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
the counter of the stars, the enumerator of the earth and of what is
therein, and the measurer of the earth.’17
Normally depicted as a man wearing an ibis mask, Thoth was a leading
member of the elite company of First Time deities who dominated
religious life in Ancient Egypt from the beginning to the end of its