Fingerprints of the Gods

  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