civilization. These were the great gods, the Neteru. Although they were
believed in one sense to be self-created, it was also openly acknowledged
and understood that they had a special connection of some kind with
another land—a fabulous and far-off country referred to in the ancient
texts as Ta-Neteru, the ‘land of the gods’.18
Ta-Neteru was thought to have had a definite earthly location a very
long way south of Ancient Egypt—seas and oceans away—farther even
than the spice country of Punt (which probably lay along East Africa’s
Somali coast).19 To confuse matters, however, Punt was also spoken of
sometimes as the ‘Divine Land’, or ‘God’s Land’, and was the source of
the sweet-smelling frankincense and myrrh especially favoured by the
gods.20
Another mythical paradise was also linked to the Neteru—an ‘abode of
the blessed’, where the best of humans were sometimes taken—which
was believed to be ‘situated away beyond a large expanse of water’. As
Wallis Budge observed in his important study, Osiris and the Egyptian
Resurrection, ‘the Egyptians believed that this land could only be reached
by means of a boat, or by the personal help of the gods who were
thought to transport their favourites thither ...’21 Those lucky enough to
gain entry would find themselves in a magical garden consisting of
‘islands, interconnected by canals filled with running water which caused
them to be always green and fertile’.22 On the islands in this garden, ‘the
wheat grew to a height of five cubits, the ears being two cubits long and
the stalks three, and the barley grew to a height of seven cubits, the ears
being three cubits long and the stalks four.’23
Was it from a land such as this,, superbly irrigated and scientifically
farmed, that the agriculture bringer Osiris, whose title was ‘President of
the Land of the South’,24 had voyaged to Egypt at the dawn of the First
17 The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, p. 400.
18 Ibid., volume I, p. 443; volume II, pp. 7, 287.
19 Ibid., volume II, p. 7, where the deity Amen-Ra is addressed in a hymn: ‘The gods love
the smell of thee when thou comest from Punt, thou eldest-born of the dew, who comest
from the Divine Land (Ta-Neteru).’ See also volume II, p. 287. Punt is thought by many
scholars to have been located on the Somali coast of East Africa where the trees that
produce frankincense and myrrh (‘the food of the gods’) are still grown today.
20 Ibid.
21 Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 98; Pyramid Texts of Pepi I, Mer-enRah and Pepi II, translated in Ibid., volume II, p. 316, where the maritime connections of
the land of the blessed are made clear.
22 Ibid., volume I, p. 97.
23 Ibid., pp. 97-8.
24 Ibid., volume II, p. 307.
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Time? And was it from a land such as this, accessible only by boat, that
ibis-masked Thoth had also made his way, crossing seas and oceans to
deliver the priceless gifts of astronomy and earth-measurement to the
primitive inhabitants of the prehistoric Nile Valley?
Whatever the truth behind the tradition, Thoth was remembered and
revered by the Ancient Egyptians as the inventor of mathematics,
astronomy and engineering.25 ‘It was his will and power’, according to
Wallis Budge, ‘that were believed to keep the forces of heaven and earth
in equilibrium. It was his great skill in celestial mathematics which made
proper use of the laws upon which the foundation and maintenance of
the universe rested.’26 Thoth was also credited with teaching the ancestral
Egyptians the skills of geometry and land-surveying, medicine and
botany. He was believed to have been the inventor ‘of figures, of the
letters of the alphabet, and of the arts of reading and writing’.27 He was
the Great Lord of Magic’28 who could move objects with the power of his
voice, ‘the author of every work on every branch of knowledge, both
human and divine’.29
It was to the teachings of Thoth—which they guarded jealously in their
temples and claimed to have been handed down from generation to
generation in the form of forty-two books of instruction30—that the
Ancient Egyptians ascribed their world-renowned wisdom and knowledge
of the skies. This knowledge was spoken of almost in awe, by the
classical commentators who visited Egypt from the fifth century BC
onwards.
Herodotus, the earliest of these travellers, noted:
The Egyptians were the first to discover the solar year, and to portion out its
course into twelve parts ... It was observation of the course of the stars which led
them to adopt this division ...31
Plato (fourth century BC) reported that the Egyptians had observed the
stars ‘for ten thousand years’.32 And later, in the first century BC, Diodorus
Siculus left this more detailed account:
The positions and arrangements of the stars as well as their motions have always
been the subject of careful observation among the Egyptians ... From ancient
times to this day they have preserved the records concerning each of these stars
over an incredible number of years ...33
25 Veronica Ions, Egyptian Mythology, Newnes Books, London, 1986, p. 84.
26 The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, pp. 407-8.
27 Ibid., volume I, p. 414.
28 Egyptian Mythology, p. 85.
29 The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, p. 414.
30 Ibid., pp 414-15.
31 The History, 2:4.
32 Reported in E. M. Antoniadi, L’Astronomie egyptienne, Paris, 1934, pp. 3-4; see also
Schwaller, p. 279.
33 Diodorus Siculus, volume I, pp. 279-80.
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Why should the Ancient Egyptians have cultivated an almost obsessional
interest in the long-term observation of the stars, and why in particular
should they have kept records of their movements ‘over an incredible
number of years’? Such detailed observations would not have been
necessary if their only interest, as a number of scholars have seriously
suggested, had been agricultural (the need to predict the seasons, which
any country-born person can do). There must have been some other
purpose.
Moreover, how did the Ancient Egyptians get started on astronomy in
the first place? It is not an obvious hobby for a valley-dwelling landlocked
people to develop on their own initiative. Perhaps we should take more
seriously the explanation they themselves offer: that their ancestors were
taught the study of the stars by a god. We might also pay closer attention
to the many unmistakably maritime references in the Pyramid Texts.34
And there could be important new inferences to draw from ancient
Egyptian religious art in which the gods are shown travelling in beautiful,
high-prowed, streamlined boats, built to the same advanced ocean-going
specifications as the pyramid boats at Giza and the mysterious fleet
moored in the desert sands at Abydos.
Landlocked people do not as rule become astronomers; seafaring
br /> people do. Is it not possible that the maritime iconography of the Ancient
Egyptians, the design of their ships, and also their splendid obsession
with observing the stars, could have been part of an inheritance passed
on to their ancestors by an unidentified seafaring, navigating race, in
remote prehistory? It is really only such an archaic race, such a forgotten
maritime civilization, that could have left its fingerprints behind in the
form of maps which accurately depict the world as it looked before the
end of the last Ice Age. It is really only such a civilization, steering its
course by the stars ‘for ten thousand years’ that could have observed and
accurately timed the phenomenon of equinoctial precession with the
exactitude attested in the ancient myths. And, although hypothetical, it is
only such a civilization that could have measured the earth with sufficient
precision to have arrived at the dimensions scaled down in the Great
Pyramid.
The signature of a distant date
It was almost midnight by the time that we reached Giza. We checked into
the Siag, a hotel with an excellent pyramid view, and sat out on our
balcony as the three stars of Orion’s belt tracked slowly across the
southern heavens.
It was the disposition of these three stars, as archaeo-astronomer
Robert Bauval had recently demonstrated, that served as the celestial
34 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, for example pp. 78, 170, 171, 290.
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template for the site-plan of the three Giza pyramids. This, in itself, was a
remarkable discovery, suggesting a far higher level of observational
astronomy, and of surveying and setting-out skills, than scholars had
attributed to the Ancient Egyptians. Even more remarkable, however—and
the reason that I had arranged to meet him at Giza the next morning—
was Bauval’s contention that the pattern traced out on the ground (in
almost fifteen million tons of perfectly dressed stone) matched exactly
the pattern in the sky during the epoch of 10,450 BC.
If Bauval was correct, the pyramids had been devised, using the
changes precession effects in the positions of the stars, as the permanent
architectural signature of the eleventh millennium BC.
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Chapter 49
The Power of the Thing
On a scale of 1:43,200 the Great Pyramid serves as a model, and mapprojection, of the northern hemisphere of the earth. What absolutely
excludes the possibility that this could be a coincidence is the fact that
the scale involved is keyed in numerically to the rate of precession of the
equinoxes—one of earth’s most characteristic planetary mechanisms. It is
therefore clear that we are confronted here by the manifestation of a
deliberate planning decision: one intended to be recognizable as such by
any culture which had acquired (a) an accurate knowledge of the
dimensions of the earth and (b) an accurate knowledge of the rate of
precessional motion.
Thanks to the work of Robert Bauval, we can now be certain that
another deliberate planning decision was implemented in the Great
Pyramid (which—it is increasingly apparent—must be understood as a
device designed to fulfill many different functions). In this case the plan
was a truly ambitious one involving the Second and Third Pyramids as
well, but it bears the fingerprints of the same ancient architects and
builders who conceived of the Great Pyramid as a scale model of the
earth. Their hallmark seems to have been precession—perhaps because
they liked its mathematical regularity and predictability—and they used
precession to devise a plan which could be understood properly only by a
scientifically advanced culture.
Ours is such a culture, and Robert Bauval is the first to have worked out
the basic parameters of the plan—a discovery for which he has received
public acclaim and will in due course, get the scientific recognition he
deserves.1 Belgian by nationality, born and brought up in Alexandria, he
is tall, lean, clean-shaven, forty-something, and going a little thin on top.
His most notable feature is a stubborn lower jaw which characterizes his
tenacious, inquiring personality; he speaks with a hybrid French-EgyptianEnglish accent and is decidedly oriental in manner. He has a first-class
mind and is always restlessly accumulating and analysing new data
relevant to his interests, finding new ways to look at old problems. In the
process, entirely by accident, he has succeeded in transforming himself
into a kind of magician of esoteric knowledge.
1 Robert Bauval’s The Orion Mystery (Heinemann, London; Crown, New York; Doubleday,
Canada; List, Germany; Planeta, Spain; Pygmalion, France, etc.) was an international
bestseller when it was published in 1994. Egyptologists closed ranks against its
implications, which they refused to discuss, but many distinguished astronomers hailed
Bauval’s findings as a breakthrough.
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The Orion Mystery
The roots of Bauval’s discoveries at Giza go back to the 1960s when the
Egyptologist and architect Dr. Alexander Badawy and the American
astronomer Virginia Trimble demonstrated that the southern shaft of the
King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid was targeted like a gun-barrel on
the Belt of Orion during the Pyramid Age—around 2600 to 2400 BC.2
Bauval decided to test the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber,
which Badawy and Trimble had not investigated, and established that it
had been sighted on the star Sirius during the Pyramid Age. The evidence
that proved this was provided by the German engineer Rudolf
Gantenbrink as a result of measurements taken by his robot Upuaut in
March 1993. This was the robot that had made the startling discovery of
a closed portcullis door blocking the shaft at a distance of about 200 feet
from the Queen’s Chamber. Equipped with a high-tech on-board
clinometer, the little machine had also provided the first-ever completely
accurate reading of the shaft’s angle of inclination: 39° 30’.3
As Bauval explains:
I did the calculations and these established that the shaft had been targeted on
the meridian transit of Sirius around the epoch 2400 BC. There couldn’t be any
doubt about it at all. I also recalculated the Orion’s Belt alignment worked out by
Badawy and Trimble with new data that Gantenbrink gave me on the inclination of
the southern shaft of the King’s Chamber. He’d measured that at 45 degrees
exactly, whereas Badawy and Trimble had worked with Flinders Petrie’s slightly
less accurate measurement of 44° 30’. The new data enabled me to refine
Badawy’s and Trimble’s date for the alignment. What I found was that the shaft
had been precisely targeted on Al Nitak, the lowest of the three belt stars, which
crossed the meridian at altitude 45 degrees around the year 2475 BC.4
Up to this point Bauval’s conclusions had been well within the
chronological bounds set by orthodox Egyptologis
ts, who normally dated
the construction of the Great Pyramid to around 2520 BC.5 If anything, the
alignments the archaeo-astronomer had come up with suggested that the
shafts had been built a little later, rather than earlier, than conventional
wisdom allowed.
As the reader is aware, however, Bauval had also made another
discovery of an altogether more unsettling nature. Once again it involved
the stars of Orion’s Belt:
They’re slanted along a diagonal in a south-westerly direction relative to the axis
of the Milky Way and the pyramids are slanted along a diagonal in a southwesterly
direction relative to the axis of the Nile. If you look carefully on a clear night you’ll
also see that the smallest of the three stars, the one at the top which the Arabs
call Mintaka, is slightly offset to the east of the principal diagonal formed by the
2 Virginia Trimble, cited in The Orion Mystery, p. 241.
3 Ibid., p. 172.
4 Personal communications/interviews, 1993-4.
5 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.
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other two. This pattern is mimicked on the ground where we see that the Pyramid
of Menkaure is offset by exactly the right amount to the east of the principal
diagonal formed by the Pyramid of Khafre (which represents the middle star, Al
Nilam) and the Great Pyramid, which represents Al Nitak. It’s really quite obvious
that all these monuments were laid out according to a unified site plan that was
modelled with extraordinary precision on those three stars. ... What they did at
Giza was to build Orion’s Belt on the ground.’6
There was more to come. Using a sophisticated computer programme7
capable of plotting the precessionally induced changes in the declinations
of all the stars visible in the sky over any part of the world in any epoch,
Bauval found that the Pyramids/Orion’s Belt correlation was general and
obvious in all epochs, but specific and exact in only one:
At 10,450 BC—and at that date only—we find that the pattern of the pyramids on
the ground provides a perfect reflection of the pattern of the stars in the sky. I
mean it’s a perfect match—faultless—and it cannot be an accident because the
entire arrangement correctly depicts two very unusual celestial events that