The message of the Sphinx: a quest for the hidden legacy of mankind (9 page)

In other words the ‘shortest route’ is not by any means the best route for the practical purposes of ventilation and, besides, it should be obvious that the Pyramid builders were not interested in time/energy-saving schemes—otherwise they would not have favoured such gigantic, multimillion-ton monuments in the first place. It therefore follows that we are unlikely to be rewarded in seeking an explanation for the precise north-south alignments of these steeply inclined shafts in terms of a time/energy-saving rationale based on quaint geometrical figures.

13. Queen’s Chamber wall and shaft mouth.

Any doubt over this issue can be resolved by a close study of the shafts of the Queen’s Chamber. Unlike the King’s Chamber shafts, those in the Queen’s Chamber (a) do not exit on the outside of the monument and (b) were not originally cut through the Chamber’s limestone walls. Instead the builders left the last five inches intact in the last block over the mouth of each of the shafts—thus rendering them invisible and inaccessible to any casual intruder. With the help of a steel chisel, they were finally discovered in 1872 by the British engineer Waynman Dixon, a Freemason whose curiosity had been aroused by the shafts in the King’s Chamber and who decided to look for similar features in the Queen’s Chamber.

14. Construction details of the Great Pyramid’s shafts. At least four different kinds of blocks (A, B, C and D), continuing the full length of the shafts, were required for the successful completion of these mysterious features of the Pyramid. The engineering problems would have been immense. The notion that the primary purpose of the shafts was for ventilation is disproved by the fact that the Queen’s Chamber shafts were originally closed at both ends and by the complexity of the design—which would not have been necessary if simple ventilation had been the objective.

In later chapters we will be considering the implications of Dixon’s 1872 discovery, and the follow-up to it. The point that we wish to make here, however, is the obvious one that shafts which were originally closed at both ends could not possibly have been used, or intended, for ventilation. They must, therefore, have had some higher purpose—one that was thought by the builders to justify the enormous care, skill and effort involved in constructing them.

As we shall see, that ‘higher purpose’ can now be identified with certainty.

Chapter 4

Stars and Time

‘The various apparent movements of the heavenly bodies which are produced by the rotation and revolution of the earth, and the effects of precession, were familiar to the Egyptians ... They carefully studied what they saw, and put their knowledge together in the most convenient fashion, associating it with their strange imaginings and their system of worship ...’

J. Norman Lockyer, The Dawn Of Astronomy, 1894

It is humbling and awe-inspiring to stand at dawn between the paws of the Great Sphinx of Egypt and to look up as the rising sun illuminates its face. The colossal statue
seems
ancient—almost as old, one might imagine, as time itself. And, as we saw in Chapter 2, a mounting body of geological evidence suggests that it
is
ancient—vastly older than the 4500 years allocated to it by Egyptologists and perhaps dating back as far as the last Ice Age when no civilization capable of fashioning such a monument is supposed to have existed.

Such notions are of course controversial and hotly disputed. Moreover, as should be obvious by now, geology is incapable of providing us with a precise chronology and is particularly limited by the present state of our knowledge of palaeo-climatology. Indeed, the most we can say, on the sole basis of the monument’s erosion patterns, is that it does appear to have been carved at a much earlier date than Egyptologists believe but that its antiquity could range anywhere between 15,000 BC and 5000 BC.

There is, however, another science which, provided one essential precondition is fulfilled, can provide a much more accurate dating—to within a few decades—of uninscribed ancient stone monuments. This is the science of archaeoastronomy. The precondition upon which it depends for its successful functioning is that the monuments studied should have been accurately aligned to the stars or to the rising points of the sun by their builders.

15. On the summer solstice at the latitude of Giza the sun rises 28 degrees north of east, on the winter solstice it rises 28 degrees south of east and on the equinoxes it rises due east. The Great Sphinx of Giza is an astronomical monument orientated perfectly towards due east and thus serves as a superb equinoctial marker or ‘pointer’.

The Great Sphinx fulfils this precondition. It lies exactly along the east-west axis of the Giza necropolis with its patient and eternal gaze set perfectly towards due east. It is, therefore, a superb ‘equinoctial marker’: its eyes target the exact position of sunrise at dawn on the spring equinox.

To clarify matters a little, astronomers speak of four ‘cardinal moments’ in the year: the summer solstice—the longest day in the northern hemisphere—when the earth’s north pole points most directly at the sun, the winter solstice, the shortest day, when the pole points most directly away from the sun, and the spring and autumn equinoxes when the earth lies broadside-on to the sun and when night and day are of equal length.

On the summer solstice at the latitude of Giza, the sun rises about 28 degrees north of east. On the winter solstice it rises about 28 degrees south of east. By contrast, the main characteristic of the equinoxes (here and everywhere else around the globe) is that the sun always rises
due east
providing a sure and accurate geodetic reference to one of the cardinal directions.

It is towards this reference point, with high precision, that the gaze of the Sphinx is set—not by accident, but by design, and as part of a vast, archaic astronomical plan of uncanny accuracy and intelligence.

Observatory

Thousands of years ago, under the clear skies of a younger world, Egypt’s Giza plateau must have been the ultimate observatory. From the high ground half a mile to the west of the Sphinx on which the three principal Pyramids stand, there would have been a faultless 360-degree view around an enormous circular horizon—a prospect that would have invited observations of the rising and setting points of the sun throughout the year, and also of the rising and setting points of the stars. It is certain, furthermore, whatever the other functions of the necropolis, that it was indeed used for practical and precise observational astronomy of the kind developed by navigators to pinpoint the positions of ships on the open ocean. Like the ability to keep strictly to a chosen course, the fabulous accuracy with which the principal monuments of Giza are aligned to true north, south, east and west could not have been achieved by any other science.
[111]

Details of these alignments have already been given in Chapter 3. It is therefore sufficient here to remind ourselves that the Great Pyramid stands at a point on the earth’s surface exactly one third of the way between the equator and the north pole (i.e. astride latitude 30) and that its ‘meridional’ (i.e. north-south) axis is aligned to within three-sixtieths of a single degree of true north-south. It is a small but significant point that this alignment is more accurate than that of the Meridian Building at the Greenwich Observatory in London—which is offset by an error of nine-sixtieths of a degree. In our opinion, such precision constitutes a ‘fact’ which archaeologists and Egyptologists have never seriously considered, i.e. that the Great Pyramid, with its 13-acre footprint and six million tons of mass, could
only
have been surveyed and set out by master astronomers.
[112]

16. The trajectory of the sun on the summer solstice, with its culmination point (highest altitude) being attained at meridian transit.

17. The trajectory of the sun on the equinox.

18. The trajectory of the sun on the winter solstice.

It is our conviction that this ‘astronomical factor’ deserves to be given much greater prominence than it has hitherto been accorded by Egyptologists. Moreover, thanks to the recent development of sophisticated star-mapping computer programs, it is possible for us to simulate the skies over Giza in any epoch during the past 30,000 years and thus to recreate the celestial environment in which the Pyramid builders worked.

Standing as it were beneath those ancient skies, initiated by microchip into the cosmic secret of the changing positions of the stars, certain features of the key monuments—features that are of no significance from the purely archaeological or Egyptological perspective—begin to take on a peculiar meaning.

Targeting Stars

Let us begin with the four mysterious shafts emanating from the King’s and Queen’s Chambers of the Great Pyramid, the engineering aspects of which we considered at the end of the previous chapter. As we have seen, two of these shafts are aligned perfectly to due north and the other two perfectly to due south. They thus target, at varying altitudes, what astronomers refer to as the ‘meridian’—an imaginary line ‘dividing the sky’ that is best envisaged as a hoop connecting the north and south poles and passing directly over the observer’s head. It is as they cross this imaginary line (‘transit the meridian’) that the stars (and also the sun, moon and planets) are said to ‘culminate’—that is, reach their maximum altitude above the horizon.

19. The horizon of Giza and the meridian of the Great Pyramid.

20. Culmination (meridian-transit) of Orion’s belt
circa
2500 BC. In this epoch the belt stars crossed the meridian at altitude 45 degrees, targeted by the southern shaft of the King’s Chamber.