Fingerprints of the Gods
symbolism and iconography of the Judaeo-Christian ‘cult’ which has roots at least 4000
years old, it should not be impossible to imagine a cult enduring for 8000 years in
Ancient Egypt and thus linking the epoch of 10450 BC to 2,450 BC. The completion of
the pyramids at that time, like the completion of a cathedral today, would therefore have
resulted in structures that expressed extremely old ideas. Plentiful evidence exists
within Ancient Egyptian tradition which seems to attest to the existence and
preservation of such ancient ideas. For example, ‘King Nefer-hetep [XIIIth Dynasty] was a
loyal worshipper of Osiris and hearing that his Temple [at Abydos] was in ruins, and that
a new statue of the god was required, he went to the temple of Ra-Atum at Heliopolis,
and consulted the books in the library there, so that he might learn how to make a
statue of Osiris which should be like that which had existed in the beginning of the
world ...’ (Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume II, p. 14). Also Sacred Science;
pp. 103-4, explains that the construction of temples in the Ptolemaic and late periods of
Egyptian history continued to obey very ancient specifications: ‘All the plans always refer
to a divine book; thus the temple of Edfu was rebuilt under the Ptolemies according to
the book of foundation composed by Imhotep, a book descended from heaven to the
north of Memphis. The temple of Dendera followed a plan recorded in ancient writings
dating from the Companions of Horus.’
434
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
out the orientations for the pyramids—because they worked to an
exacting geometry and because they knew how to align the baseplatforms, or whatever it was they built, perfectly to the cardinal points.’
‘Do you think they also knew that they were marking out the site of the
Great Pyramid on latitude 30° North?’
Bauval laughed: I’m certain they knew. I think they knew everything
about the shape of the earth. They knew their astronomy. They had a
good understanding of the solar system and of celestial mechanics. They
were also incredibly accurate and incredibly precise in everything they
did. So, all in all, I don’t think anything really happened here by chance—
at least not between 10,450 and 2450 BC. I get the feeling that everything
was planned, intended, carefully worked out ... Indeed I get the feeling
that they were fulfilling a long-term objective—some kind of purpose, if
you like, and that they brought this to fruition in the third millennium BC
... ‘In the form of the fully built pyramids which they then precessionally
anchored to Al Nitak and to Sirius at the time of completion?’
‘Yes. And also, I think, in the form of the Pyramid Texts. My guess is
that the Pyramid Texts are part of the puzzle.’
‘The software to the Pyramids’ hardware?’
‘Quite possibly. Why not? At any rate it’s certain that there’s a
connection. I think what it means is that if we’re going to decode the
pyramids properly then we’re going to have to use the Texts ...’
‘What’s your guess?’ I asked Bauval. ‘What do you think the purpose of
the pyramid builders really might have been?’
‘They didn’t do it because they wanted an eternal tomb,’ he replied
firmly. ‘In my view, they had no doubts at all that they would eternally
live. They did it—whoever did it—they have transmitted the power of their
ideas through something that is to all intents and purposes eternal. They
succeeded in creating a force that is functional in itself, provided you
understand it, and that force is the questions it challenges you to ask. My
guess is that they knew the human mind to perfection. They knew the
game of ritual ... Right? I’m serious. They knew what they were doing.
They knew that they could initiate people far ahead in the future into
their way of thinking even though they couldn’t be there themselves.
They knew that they could do this by creating an eternal machine, the
function of which was to generate questions.’
I suppose that I must have looked puzzled.
‘The machine is the pyramids!’ Bauval exclaimed, ‘the whole of the Giza
necropolis really. And look at us. What are we doing? We’re asking
questions. We’re standing out here, shivering, at an ungodly hour,
watching the sun come up, and we’re asking questions, lots and lots of
questions just as we’ve been programmed to do. We’re in the hands of
real magicians here, and real magicians know that with symbols—with the
right symbols, with the right questions—they can lead you into initiating
435
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
yourself. Provided, that is, you are a person who asks questions. And, if
you are, then the minute you start asking questions about the pyramids
you begin to stumble into a whole series of answers which lead you to
other questions, and then more answers until finally you initiate yourself
...’
‘Sow the seed ...’
‘Yes. They were sowing the seed. Believe me, they were magicians, and
they knew the power of ideas ... They knew how to set ideas growing and
developing in people’s minds. And if you start with such ideas, and follow
the process of reasoning like I did, you arrive at things like Orion, and
10,450 BC. In short, this is a process that works on its own. When it
enters, when it settles into the subconscious, it is a self-willing
conversion. Once it’s there you can’t even resist it ...’
‘You’re talking as though this Giza cult, whatever it was—revolving
around precession, and geometry, and the pyramids, and the Pyramid
Texts—you’re talking as though it still exists.’
‘In a sense it does still exist,’ Robert replied. ‘Even if the driver is no
longer at the wheel, the Giza necropolis is still a machine that was
designed to provoke questions.’ He paused and pointed up to the summit
of the Great Pyramid where Santha and I had climbed, at dead of night,
nine months previously. ‘Look at its power,’ he continued. ‘Five thousand
years on it still gets you. It involves you whether you like it or not ... It
forces you into a process of thinking ... forces you to learn. The minute
you ask a question about it you’ve asked a question about engineering,
you’ve asked a question about geometry, you’ve asked a question about
astronomy. So it forces you to learn about engineering and geometry and
astronomy, and gradually you begin to realize how sophisticated it is,
how incredibly clever and skilful and knowledgeable its builders must
have been, which forces you to ask questions about mankind, about
human history, eventually about yourself too. You want to find out. This
is the power of the thing.’
The second signature
As Robert, Santha and I sat out on the Giza plateau that cold December
morning at the end of 1993, we watched the winter sun, now very close
to solstice, rising over the right shoulder of the Sphinx, almost as far
south of east as it would travel on its yearly journey before turning north
again.
T
he Sphinx was an equinoctial marker, with its gaze directed precisely
at the point of sunrise on the vernal equinox. Was it, too, part of the Giza
‘grand plan’?
I reminded myself that in any epoch, and at any period of history or
prehistory, the Sphinx’s due east gaze would always have been sighted
on the equinoctial rising of the sun, at both the vernal and the autumnal
436
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
equinoxes. As the reader will recall from Part V, however, it was the
vernal equinox that was considered by ancient man to be the marker of
the astronomical age. In the words of Santillana and von Dechend:
The constellation that rose in the east, just before the sun, marked the ‘place’
where the sun rested ... It was known as the sun’s ‘carrier’ and the vernal equinox
was recognised as the fiducial point of the ‘system’ determining the first degree of
the sun’s yearly cycle ...’15
Why should an equinoctial marker have been made in the shape of a giant
lion?
In our own lifetimes, the epoch of AD 2000, a more suitable shape for
such a marker—should anyone wish to build one—would be a
representation of a fish. This is because the sun on the vernal equinox
rises against the stellar background of Pisces, as it has done for
approximately the last 2000 years. The astronomical Age of Pisces began
around the time of Christ.16 Readers must judge for themselves whether it
is a coincidence that the principal symbol used for Christ by the very
early Christians was not the cross but the fish.17
During the preceding age, which broadly-speaking encompassed the
first and second millennia BC, it was the constellation of Aries—the Ram—
which had the honour of carrying the sun on the vernal equinox. Again,
readers must judge whether it is a coincidence that the religious
iconography of that epoch was predominantly ram-oriented.18 Is it a
coincidence, for example, that Yahweh, God of Old Testament Israel,
provided a ram as a substitute for Abraham’s offered sacrifice of his son
Isaac?19 (Abraham and Isaac are assumed by biblical scholars and
archaeologists to have lived during the early second millennium BC20). Is it
likewise coincidental that rams, in one context or another, are referred to
in almost every book of the Old Testament (entirely composed during the
Age of Aries) but in not a single book of the New Testament?21 And is it
an accident that the advent of the Age of Aries, shortly before the
beginning of the second millennium BC, was accompanied in Ancient
Egypt by an upsurge in the worship of the god Amon whose symbol was a
ram with curled horns?22 Work on the principal sanctuary of Amon—the
Temple of Karnak at Luxor in upper Egypt—was begun at around 2000
BC23 and, as those who have visited that temple will recall, its principal
icons are rams, long rows of which guard its entrances.
The immediate predecessor to the Age of Aries was the Age of Taurus—
15 Hamlet’s Mill, p. 59.
16 Ibid.; Sacred Science, p. 179.
17 Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 514.
18 Sacred Science, p. 177.
19 Genesis: 22:13
20 Jerusalem Bible, chronological table, p. 343.
21 King James Bible, Franklin, Computerized First Edition.
22 The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 20.
23 Ibid., p. 133.
437
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
the Bull—which spanned the period between 4380 and 2200 BC.24 It was
during this precessional epoch, when the sun on the vernal equinox rose
in the constellation of Taurus, that the Bull-cult of Minoan Crete
flourished.25 And during this epoch, too, the civilization of dynastic Egypt
burst upon the historical scene, fully formed, apparently without
antecedents. Readers must judge whether it is a coincidence that
Egyptians at the very beginning of the dynastic period were already
venerating the Apis and Mnevis Bulls—the former being considered a
theophany of the god Osiris and the latter, the sacred animal of
Heliopolis, a theophany of the god Ra.26
Why should an equinoctial marker have been made in the form of a
lion?
I looked down the slope of the Giza plateau towards the great leonine
body of the Sphinx.
Khafre, the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh believed by Egyptologists to have
carved the monument out of bedrock around 2500 BC, had been a
monarch of the Age of Taurus. For almost 1800 years before his reign,
and more than 300 years after it, the sun on the vernal equinox rose
unfailingly in the constellation of the Bull. It follows that if a monarch at
such a time had set out to create an equinoctial marker at Giza, he would
have had every reason to have it carved in the form of a bull, and none
whatsoever to have it carved in the form of a lion. Indeed, and it was
obvious, there was only one epoch when the celestial symbolism of a
leonine equinoctial marker would have been appropriate. That epoch was,
of course, the Age of Leo, from 10,970 to 8810 BC.27
Why, therefore, should an equinoctial marker have been made in the
shape of a lion? Because it was made during the Age of Leo when the sun
on the vernal equinox rose against the stellar background of the
constellation of the Lion, thus marking the coordinates of a precessional
epoch that would not experience its ‘Great Return’ for another 26,000
years.
Around 10,450 BC the three stars of Orion’s Belt reached the lowest
point in their precessional cycle: west of the Milky Way, 11° 08’ above the
southern horizon at meridian transit. On the ground west of the Nile, this
event was frozen into architecture in the shape of the three pyramids of
Giza. Their layout formed the signature of an unmistakable epoch of
precessional time.
Around 10,450 BC, the sun on the vernal equinox rose in the
constellation of Leo. On the ground at Giza, this event was frozen into
architecture in the shape of the Sphinx, a gigantic, leonine, equinoctial
marker which, like the second signature on an official document, could
24 Sacred Science, p. 177.
25 As early as 3000 BC. See Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 3:731.
26 Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, pp. 27, 171.
27 Skyglobe 3.6.
438
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
be taken as a confirmation of authenticity.
The eleventh millennium BC, in other words, soon after the ‘Mill of
Heaven’ broke, shifting sunrise on the spring equinox from Virgo into the
constellation of Leo, was the only epoch in which the due east facing
Sphinx would have manifested exactly the right symbolic alignment on
exactly the right day—watching the vernal sun rising in the dawn sky
against the background of his own celestial counterpart ...
Looking due east at dawn on the vernal equinox in 10,450 BC. The
Sphinx and the constellation of Leo.
439
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
Forcing the question
‘It can’t be a
coincidence that such a perfect alignment of the terrestrial
and the celestial occurs at around 10,450 BC,’ said Robert. ‘In fact I don’t
think coincidence is any longer an issue. To me the real question is why?
Why was it done? Why did they go to such lengths to make this enormous
statement about the eleventh millennium BC?’
‘Obviously because it was an important time for them,’ suggested
Santha.
‘It must have been very, very important. You don’t do something like
this, create a series of vast precessional markers like these, carve a
Sphinx, put up three pyramids weighing almost 15 million tons, unless
you have some hugely important reason. So the question is: what was
that reason? They’ve forced this question by making such a strong,
imperative statement about 10,450 BC. Really, they’ve forced the
question. They want to draw our attention to 10,450 BC and it’s up to us
to work out why.’
We fell silent, for a long while as the sun climbed the sky south-east of
the Great Sphinx.
440
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
Part VIII
Conclusion
Where’s the Body?
441
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
Chapter 50
Not a Needle in a Haystack
When I was only a few months into this investigation, my research
assistant sent me a fifteen-page letter explaining why he had decided to
resign. At that stage I hadn’t yet begun to put the pieces of the puzzle
together and I was working more on hunches than on hard evidence. I
was captivated by all the mysteries, anomalies, anachronisms and
puzzles, and wanted to learn as much about them as I could. My
researcher, meanwhile, had been looking into the long, slow processes by
which some known civilizations had come into global history.
It transpired that, in his opinion, certain significant economic, climatic,
topographical and geographical preconditions had to be met before a
civilization could evolve:
So if you are looking for a hitherto undiscovered civilization of great originators
who made it on their own, separate from any of the ones we already know, you are
not looking for a needle in a haystack. You are looking for something more like a
city in its hinterland. What you are looking for is a vast region which occupied a