Secrets of the Sphinx: How the pyramids form a map of the skies – and the implications

Who really carved the Great Sphinx of Egypt and constructed Mexico‘s Pyramid of the Sun? For centuries man has been baffled by the great monuments left behind by the ancients. How could various ancient peoples around the world have mastered the principles of advanced astronomy and complex mathematics?

Now best-selling author Graham Hancock, who has spent the past five years researching these mysteries, believes he may have some answers. He has written a provocative book which challenges the exiting wisdoms about our past. Earlier this week he explained what his quest revealed in the high Andes and the plains of Central Mexico. He told how in both places there were legends of mysterious bearded pale-skinned `supergods’ – named Viracocha in the Andes and Quetzacoatl in Mexico – who arrived after a great flood bringing with them the gifts of civilisation.

Hancock believes these legends point to a lost civilisation which flourished before the last Ice Age but was wiped out in an apocalypse some 12,000 years ago. Today his mission takes him on to the Nile…

You join me in the small hours of the morning at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Egypt. Together with my wife Santha and a local guide (who had bribed the guards to turn a blind eye to our presence), I made my way around the north-eastern corner of the last surviving wonder of the ancient world and then along the base of the eastern face.

Our plan was to climb the pyramid – something that had been strictly illegal since 1983 when the messy falls of several foolhardy tourists had forced the Egyptian government to impose a ban. I realised that we were being foolish too (particularly since we were attempting the climb at night) and I didn’t feel good about breaking what was basically a sensible law. By this stage, however, my intense interest in the pyramid and desire to learn everything that I could about it, had completely overridden my common sense.

Long ago, I had familiarised myself with the monument’s dimensions, noting that the northern face was aligned almost perfectly to true north, the eastern face almost perfectly to true east. The average error was only around three minutes of arc (three 60ths of a single degree), which was reduced to less than two minutes on the southern face – incredible accuracy for any building in any epoch, and an inexplicable, almost supernatural feat here in Egypt 4,500 years ago when the Great Pyramid was supposed to have been built.

But then the same uncanny precision was demonstrated in every feature of the immense edifice. For example, its sides at the base are all almost exactly the same length, demonstrating a margin of error far smaller than modern architects would be required to achieve in the construction of, say, an average sized office-block.

This was no office-block, however – this was the largest single stone structure ever built by man and also one of the oldest. We walked on, coming to the monument’s south-eastern corner a little after 4.15am.

Very few modern buildings, even the houses we live in, have corners that consist of perfect 90 degree right-angles. It doesn’t make any difference structurally and nobody can notice such minute errors. In the case of the Great Pyramid, however, I knew that the ancient master-builders had found a way to narrow down the margin of error to almost nothing. Thus, while falling short of the perfect 90 degrees, the south-eastern corner nonetheless achieved an impressive 89 degrees 56′ 27”.

Of course, such accuracy is extraordinary. And like almost everything else about the Great Pyramid it was also extremely difficult to explain. Surely such building techniques – easily as accurate as the best we have today – could only have been evolved after thousands of years of development and experimentation?

Yet the Great Pyramid and its neighbours at Giza had emerged out of a black hole in architectural history that was so deep and so wide, that neither its bottom nor its far side had ever been clearly identified.

SHIPS IN THE DESERT

We now began to make our way in a westerly direction along the monument’s southern side. Here, there were two deep boat-shaped pits in the ground one of which, although still sealed, had been investigated with fibre-optic cameras and was known to contain a high-prowed sea-going vessel more than 100ft long. The other pit had been excavated in the Fifties.

Its contents – an even larger sea-going vessel, this time a full 141ft in length – had been placed in the so-called Boat Museum, an ugly modern structure that gangled above us on stilts beneath the south face of the Pyramid.

Made of cedarwood, the beautiful ship was still in perfect condition 4,500 years after it had first been built. With a displacement of around 40 tons, its design was particularly thought-provoking, incorporating in the words of one expert ‘all the sea-going ship’s characteristic properties, with prow and stern soaring upward, higher than in a Viking ship, to ride out the breakers and high seas, not to contend with the little ripples of the Nile’.

Another authority felt that the careful and clever design of this strange pyramid boat could potentially have made it ‘a far more seaworthy craft than anything available to Columbus’.

Moreover, the experts agreed that it had been built to a pattern that could only have been ‘created by shipbuilders from a people with a long, solid tradition of sailing on the open sea’. Who were those as-yet-unidentified shipbuilders? Certainly they had not accumulated their ‘long, solid tradition of sailing on the open sea’ while ploughing the fields of the landlocked Nile Valley. Where and when had they managed to develop their maritime skills?

THE PHAROAH`S CHALLENGE

I do not recommend climbing a pyramid at night while fearful of getting arrested. The Great Pyramid consists of 203 separate courses of masonry. We had ascended some 30 courses and already our knees and fingers were stiff and bruised – yet we were barely one-seventh of the way to the summit. There were still more than 170 courses left to climb.

To have worked effectively, the ancient pyramid-builders must have had nerves of steel, the agility of mountain goats, the strength of lions and the confidence of trained steeplejacks.

As I continued to climb, I reminded myself of the implications of all of this. The pyramid contained thousands of truly enormous blocks each weighing 15 tons or more and some weighing as much as 70 tons.

But the real crises would have been caused by the millions of average-sized blocks weighing around 2.5 tons that also had to be brought to the working place. The pyramid (weighing more than six million tons) had been reliably estimated to consist of more than 2.3 million blocks. Assuming that the masons had worked ten hours a day, 365 days a year, then they would have needed to place 31 blocks in position every hour – about one every two minutes – in order to complete the Pyramid during the 20-year reign of Khafre, the Fourth Dynasty Pharaoh for whom the monument was supposed to have been built.

Assuming that construction work had been confined to Egypt’s annual three-month agricultural lay-off season (the only time when a sufficiently large workforce would have been available), then the problems multiplied; now four blocks a minute would have had to have been delivered.

Such managerial obstacles seem staggering enough. But the master-builders had gone on to play some clever mathemical games with the monument’s dimensions. Firstly, they had built the Great Pyramid exactly on latitude 30 – the 30th parallel – precisely one-third of the way between the Earth’s North Pole and the equator. Secondly, they appeared to have conceived of this edifice as a mathematical scale model of the northern hemisphere.

At any rate, the Great Pyramid’s base-perimeter (3,023.16ft) multiplied by 43,200 gives an extremely precise `read-out’ of the equatorial circumference of the Earth, while the Great Pyramid’s height (481.3949 feet) multiplied by 43,200 gives an even more precise read-out of the polar radius of the Earth.

Why is that ratio 1:43,200 significant? Today we know that the sun spends exactly 2,160 years in each of the 12 zodiacs. So it is most unlikely that the figure of 43,200 which provides the scale of the Pyramid/Earth ratio could have been arrived at by chance. This figure turns out to be exactly 20 times the number of years that the sun takes to pass through one zodiacal sign (20 x 2,160 = 43,200).

Today we live very near the end of the astrological Age of Pisces. The `new Age’ that is soon about to dawn is that of Aquarius.

From around 2200 BC until just before the time of Christ, the constellation of Aries housed the sun on the vernal equinox. And at the date when the Great Pyramid and the Great Sphinx of Egypt are supposed to have been built – around 2500 BC – it was the astrological Age of Taurus, the bull, when the dominant motifs of Egyptian art and sculpture were the long-horned Apis and Mnevis bulls – and the symbolism switched overwhelmingly to rams during the Age of Aries.

FIRST TIME OF OSIRIS

For the next ten minutes of our climb, we struggled upwards in silence along the line of the Great Pyramid’s south-western corner until we had reached the 100th course – roughly the half-way mark and already more than 250ft above the ground. Here we gazed over our shoulders to the south-west, where a once-in-a-lifetime vision of staggering beauty and power confronted us.

In the vastly sophisticated religious system of the ancient Egyptians (which, mysteriously, was fully mature and complete at the very beginning of historical civilisation in the Nile Valley), the most important group of stars in the heavens was the giant constellation of Orion, identified with the high god Osiris.

Remembered as tall and bearded, and as having come to Egypt from a distant land in a time of flood and chaos (the mythical `First Time’), Osiris was the counterpart of Viracocha in the Andes and Quetzalcoatl in Mexico – a bringer of laws, religion and advanced knowledge, who was honoured as the founder of Egyptian civilization. This was his human aspect as a man; it was his stellar manifestation, however, in the form of the constellation of Orion, that most interested me.

Thanks to the work of the archaeo-astronomer Robert Bauval (whose bestseller The Orion Mystery recently topped the paperback charts), we now know that the layout of the three pyramids of Giza on the ground was designed to mimic the pattern made in the sky by the three stars of Orion’s belt. Most interesting of all, however, is what computer reconstructions of the skies above Giza in antiquity tell us about the changes in altitude and orientation of these belt stars.

As we follow these changes back down the epochs, we find that the correlation with the three pyramids is general and obvious in all epochs, but specific and exact in only one – the epoch of 10,500 BC, around the end of the last Ice Age, when heavy rains were falling on Egypt and scientifically accurate maps of the lost continent of Antarctica were being prepared by the cartographers of an as yet unidentified civilization.

What we have at Giza is a three-dimensional map of the belt-stars of Orion exactly as they looked in the sky in 10,500 BC and in no other epoch. Ever since then, the belt stars have been slowly but remorsely rising in the sky, reaching their maximum altitude above the horizon only today, in our own epoch. In this sense, therefore, we are living in the mythological `last of times’, facing the end of a great cycle – a notion that coincides eerily with the ancient Mayan calendar which, as we saw yesterday, predicted the final cataclysm and the end of the world in AD 2012.

The three stars of Orion’s belt had not yet set when, panting and breathless, we suddenly found ourselves at the top of the Great Pyramid after a 30-minute climb, standing more than 450ft above the surrounding plateau on the most extraordinary viewing platform in the world.

THE SILENT SPHINX

The next day, Santha and I positioned ourselves at dawn between the paws of the Great Sphinx. Had it been the vernal equinox, we would have seen the sun rising due east of us at precisely the point on the horizon targeted by the Sphinx’s inscrutable gaze. The Sphinx, in other words, was an astronomical monument designed to pinpoint the vernal equinox.

Why, therefore, was it fashioned in the shape of a man-headed lion, 66ft high and more than 240ft long? If Egyptologists were right in attributing it to the Fourth Dynasty Pharaoh Khafre around 2,500 BC – the astrological Age of Taurus – then surely its shape should have been that of a bull?

But perhaps it wasn’t carved during the Age of Taurus.

Perhaps it was much older. After all, there was no hard evidence in support of the orthodox attribution to Khafre. Indeed, Professor Mark Lehner of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, one of the most orthodox Egyptologists of all, has recently been obliged to admit that the official dating was a matter of opinion only. There was, he confirmed, `no direct way to date the Sphinx itself, because the Sphinx is carved right out of natural rock’.

Egyptians have always regarded the Sphinx as being very, very old and the possibility that the Sphinx could date from thousands of years before Khafre, was one I had long since learned to take seriously. On this dawn visit, everything that I saw around me further confirmed what I already knew.

First and foremost, the rolling, undulating weathering patterns combined with deep vertical fissures – so prominently visible on the body of the monument and in the surrounding bedrock trench from which it had been hewn – had recently been proved by American geologists to have been caused not by wind and sand (the principal erosional agents at Giza today) but by thousands of years of heavy rainfall – climatic conditions that have not been experienced in this part of Egypt since around 10,000 BC.

According to Professor Robert Schoch of Boston University, the vertical fissures in particular were conclusive evidence: `The fissures could only have been formed by water running down the trench wall,’ the result of rain falling in enormous quantities and then cascading over the slope of the Giza plateau and down into the Sphinx enclosure below. `It picked out the weak spots in the rock,’ Schoch elaborated, `and opened them up into these fissures – clear evidence that this erosional feature was caused by rainfall.’

Schoch was not the first geologist to have noticed the `anomalous precipitation-induced weathering features on the core body of the Sphinx’. He was, however, the first to have become actively involved in public debates over the immense historical implications of this weathering.

His attitude, very firmly, was that he preferred to stick to his geology: `I’ve been told over and over again that the peoples of Egypt, as far as we know, did not have either the technology or the social organisation to cut out the core body of the Sphinx in pre-Dynastic times.

`However, I don’t see it as being my problem as a geologist. I’m not seeking to shift the burden, but its really up to the Egyptologists and archaeologists to figure out who carved it. If my findings are in conflict with their theory about the rise of civilisation, then maybe it’s time for them to re-evaluate that theory. I’m not saying that the Sphinx was built by Atlanteans or people from Mars, or extra-terrestrials. I’m just following the science where it leads me, and it leads me to conclude that the Sphinx was built much earlier than previously thought.’

Naturally, Egyptologists have consistently refused to accept or even consider the momentous implications of Schoch’s findings. From outside the discipline of geology, however, another piece of evidence strongly corroborates his conclusion.

We have seen how the three gigantic pyramids at Giza are laid out on the ground in the pattern of the three stars of Orion’s Belt – not quite as they look today, or even as they looked in the so-called Pyramid Age around 2500 BC, but exactly as they looked in 10,500 BC. We have seen, also, how the date of 10,500 BC (which the unknown founders of Giza so spectacularly immortalised in stone) marks a highly significant moment in the precessional cycle of those stars – their `First Time’, the beginning of their great upward cycle above the horizon.

Is it a coincidence that a second confirmation of this same remote date was also immortalised in stone at Giza in the form of the Great Sphinx? As high as a six-storey building and as long as a city block, it was unmistakably fashioned in the form of an enormous, crouching lion.

Looking now along its powerful forepaws and heavily eroded sides, I understood very clearly that there was really only one epoch in which such symbolism would have been appropriate – certainly not in the astrological Age of Taurus but in the far earlier astrological Age of Leo, when the sun on the vernal equinox rose against the majestic background of the constellation of the celestial lion.

The Sphinx, in other words, was not just an equinoctial marker but an equinoctial marker for the Age of Leo, which computer calculations tell us began at around 10,500 BC. This, at any rate, 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.

Was this another Fingerprint of the Gods? Geology and astronomy combine with the testimony of ancient Egyptian myths to suggest that something astonishing must have happened at Giza in the 11th millennium BC – and that astonishing event appears to have been the entry into the Nile Valley of the `gods’ of the `First Time’, led by the bearded Osiris, remembered forever-after as a great benefactor and bringer of civilisation.

In previous days of this serialisation, we have learned about similar bearded deities – Virachocha in the Andes, Quetzalcoatl in Mexico. Could all three of these `gods’ and their bands of companions have been the survivors of an advanced prehistoric civilisation of map-makers, seafarers and architects – a civilization destroyed by the Ice Age and forgotten until now?

• Adapted from Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock (Century, £22.99). © Graham Hancock 1995.