Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology's Greatest Mystery (20 page)

Khufu’s pyramid is aligned so that the diagonals of its sides are both perfectly aligned to the pyramids of his two sons. It looked for all the world as though Khufu was facing the setting Sun and stretching his arms out toward his sons exactly 90 degrees apart. The chances of this arrangement happening by accident are virtually nonexistent, and it must have taken great skill to get the alignment so accurate over a distance well beyond the horizon. So we conclude that even this distant pyramid was part of a complex plan created by Khufu during his lifetime. It may be that he accepted Djedefre’s single-minded religious beliefs concerning Ra, the Sun, but still wanted to involve him the largely star-orientated theology that he had been developing, to ensure that he and his progeny found an eternal home in the Duat above.

When we looked at the distance between Khufu’s and Djedefre’s pyramids it was 8,218 m centre to centre, which was immediately interesting. We then measured the distances between the locations of each sarcophagus and found that the mummified bodies of the two kings had been placed 8,235 m apart – which, to an accuracy of 99.6 per cent, happens to be 10,000 Megalithic Yards!

So, let us now return to question as to where the astronomical knowledge underpinning the planning of the pyramids came from. Our answer is that it came from the British Isles – and there are very hard-edged reasons for making this apparently outlandish claim.

The British Isles, along with some other parts of Western Europe, still has the remains of tens of thousands of structures used for tracking and measuring the movements of the Moon, planets and stars. Thornborough itself had been in use for almost a millennium before the pyramids were built. Given that both the henges of Thornborough and the three pyramids of the Giza Plateau appear to be built in the form of Orion’s Belt, there are three possible explanations for the connection.

First, it could be that there is no connection at all. It is simply that two different cultures naturally focused their attention on Sirius, the brightest of all stars, and then noticed a nearly straight line of three stars rise ahead of it and point almost at it. They then attached some mystical significance to these stars and decided for some reason to build a model of them on the ground.

The second option is that there was contact between the ancient Egyptians and the people of megalithic Britain, and the Egyptians adopted the beliefs of the Northerners by merging their star-based astronomical ‘magic’ into their existing solar theology.

The third possibility is that the astronomical priesthood of the British megalithic culture was actively involved in the design and layout of the pyramids. Whilst all of the evidence shows that the people of Britain were far behind the Egyptians in terms of stone building and the production of bronze tools, they were clearly ahead in their astronomy and the adoption of complex multifunctional measuring systems. Critics might argue that any association between these two groups would have led to the adoption of metals in Britain at a far earlier date, but we have good reason to believe that this would have been an anathema to the megalithic priesthood. This is an argument too complicated to enter into within the scope of this book. To follow this third, ‘strong’ version of the British-Egyptian theory, it could be that either the megalithic priests came to Egypt or that the Egyptian kings sent their builder-priests north to investigate the ‘magic’ of the stars understood by a people they had learned about.

The evidence suggests it was the latter of these options that occurred.

If the pyramids were placed as we have argued – by timing the stars of Orion’s belt rising and then converting the pendulum lengths used into linear units – then we can detect where and when it was done. This is because the angle of the rising of the stars changes by latitude, and when we looked at the rising of the stars of Orion’s Belt at Giza in circa 2500
BC
we found no correlation whatsoever with the actual layout of the pyramids in any units at all.

But then we tried Thornborough and the fit was immediate – and astonishingly accurate! Using standard astronomy software we took the timings on the autumn equinox at Thornborough on 14 October in 2500
BC
and we found that the three stars rose at following times of day, using a 24-hour clock:

Mintaka 21:02:27

Alnilam 21:10:49

Alnitak 21:18:11

As we have previously said, it is the two outer stars that have to be measured at rising because the dogleg of the middle star distorts the true timing and therefore ultimately the linear distance between the stars. This means that the time taken between the rising of Mintaka and Alnitak was 15 minutes and 44 seconds – a total of 944 seconds.

The time lag between the rising of the first and last stars represented 944 swings of a seconds-pendulum that was 99.55 cm in length: 944 such lengths would measure 940 m. The gap between the centres of Khufu’s and Menkaure’s pyramid, as best as we can tell, is 942 m. This gives a fit of 99.8 per cent, which is as close to perfect as it is possible to get, given that we could be slightly out in our estimations of the true distance between pyramid centres, and bearing in mind that the Egyptians could have been slightly out in placing them.

Either it is a huge coincidence that both structures are copies of Orion’s Belt and the measure of the stars at Thornborough in 2500
BC
fit the pyramids’ position on the ground, or there is a connection. It becomes obvious that further and quite extensive research into possible connections between the two cultures in question is going to be necessary. From our own point of view we remain utterly convinced that the three major pyramids on the Giza Plateau were built upon a footprint that was not created first on the desert sand by the side of the Nile, but in the green and pleasant land of North Yorkshire. Both the Thornborough henges and the Giza Pyramids were planned by engineers, and engineers cannot avoid leaving evidence of their presence. In both these cases we can see their footsteps as clearly as if they walked this way yesterday.

•

At the end of February 2009 we set off to Rome where we were due to give a talk at a conference on new developments in Egyptology. It was an early start, but we were picked up at the airport by a driver and dropped at our hotel before 10 o’clock, and 30 minutes later we were outside a building which both of us had quite separately identified as the greatest structure of the Roman period. The Pantheon, or ‘place of all gods’, is in the heart of this beautiful city and it leaves all others, from St Peter’s to the Coliseum, trailing a long way behind for beauty, engineering and sheer visual impact.

It was built early in the 2nd century
AD
by Hadrian, to replace an earlier structure destroyed in
AD
80. This earlier Pantheon had been lost in a great fire, believed to have been started by proto-Christian Jews seeking revenge for the killing of James, the brother of Jesus, and subsequently destroying the entire city of Jerusalem in
AD
70.

Behind its façade of Corinthian pillars lies a gigantic concrete domed hall that is 43.3 m (142 ft) in diameter, and the same in height to the open circle at its highest point. The 5,000-tonne dome still holds the record for the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.

Without doubt Rome is a fabulous city. Despite having many structures destroyed in the 7th century it remains tremendously unspoilt, and is still a relatively small city that can be fully walked well within a day. We realize that for many visitors, especially from the New World, this must seem an ancient place. Thoughts of dramatic events from the remote past excite the mind. It was here that Julius Caesar entertained his lover, Cleopatra, the beautiful Hellenistic Pharaoh of the Egyptians. Here the emperor met his death at the hands of assassins. His ally Mark Anthony eventually travelled to Egypt where he also began a liaison with Cleo-patra. Caesar’s child by Cleopatra was strangled and never saw Rome. All ancient high drama.

Whilst the city is old and associated with power and strife in equal measures, it does not seem so ancient in our scale of measure. Remember that the city did not come into existence until some 3,000 years after the Thornborough henges were first constructed. So the days of the Roman Empire are much closer in time to us today than they are to the Neolithic structures that stand across the landscape of the British Isles.

It was, of course, Julius Caesar who conducted the first Roman invasion of Britain in 55
BC
, and according to the woefully under-informed purveyors of ‘standard’ history, they met a bunch of primitive tribesmen who painted themselves blue. They did bring quite a lot of new ideas with them, but not all of them were quite as original as the invaders believed. The straight roads were already here, and even flushable toilets have been found in 5,000-year-old settlements such as the apparent college at Skara Brae in Orkney. And even when they eventually brought their new cult of Romanized Christianity, the locals told them that they had known of this dying and resurrecting god for 1,000 years.

As we meandered around Rome’s narrow streets and spacious squares, we began to discuss the challenge of fitting in the key points of our recent findings into a relatively short talk to people who would be unfamiliar with the British Neolithic period. However, when we gave our talk the next day it went down extraordinarily well, despite the difficulties of translation. Kind as they were, it was not the audience that made this trip an unexpected success – it was two fellow contributors that we had met at dinner the previous evening, both of whom had just flown in from different sides of the USA.

One of the speakers was Robert Schoch, a geologist from Boston University, who was accompanied by his delightful ballerina wife Kate. Robert is a hard-nosed academic with an open mind. He spoke eloquently and convincingly about the dating of the Great Sphinx (on the Giza Plateau) by means of water erosion. He pointed out that, whilst much of the Sphinx has either been overcut or repaired across the millennia, the original workings can be dated by the excavated pit which was cut out of bedrock around the first monument. The walls of the cut-out rock face show that the base was lowered in relatively recent times, but the main part of the digging was completed before a long and sustained massive flooding took place. Consequently, he puts the original Sphinx as being more than double the age of the pyramids that stand above and behind it on the Giza Plateau.

He explained that geological evidence of ancient comet impacts is changing, or should be changing the way we view the past. The idea of these cataclysmic events occurring with some relative frequency is now becoming widely accepted within geology, as having brought catastrophe to the world with terrifying frequency over the period that humankind has existed on the planet. Such impacts on the oceans understandably create mega-tsunamis that drive deep into continental landmass and cause monsoon rains to fall for perhaps decades.

According to Schoch, the features of the rock around the rear and sides of the Sphinx can only have been caused by massive and sustained water flow, such as would occur after a comet impact.

In 1999 Chris wrote
Uriel’s Machine
with Robert Lomas, describing the geological case and the anthropological evidence that the biblical Flood had caused a major global catastrophe. Whilst Chris’ argument had begun with evidence published by leading geologists, it was good to hear detailed confirmation that this did indeed occur. Although, it would be preferable to be wrong – because according to the previous intervals of such horrible events, we are more than due for another impact. Then we will know what ‘climate change’ can really mean. Several years ago Chris was flying from Dallas to San Francisco, and he noticed that there was a white circle in every major hollow in the desert below him, which made him look further north and think of the salt flats of Utah. If there had been a massive flood here (and a major comet fragment hit off the coast of Mexico) this area would have had a super-giant tsunami ripping across the landscape. As it lost momentum and ran back to the sea it would, logically, have left huge pools of seawater trapped in low-lying areas.

Could those circles be sea salt and could the salt flats be the residue of a seawater incursion?

Upon returning to England, Chris found that the answer was ‘yes’ and ‘yes’. It is known that 10,000 years ago, in what is now the US state of Utah, humans fished freshwater lakes in a pleasant green landscape, and then suddenly it changed. And the salt is not any old salt, it is clearly sea salt – containing all of the various minerals (including traces of gold) that the oceans possess.

This part of North America was devastated by a comet impact, and old Native American stories tell of the survivors on high ground watching a wall of sea hurtling towards them.
¹
So too was North Africa. The plains that were once full of lakes, foliage and animal life were overtaken by heat and became the Sahara Desert. Another speaker at the Rome conference, Mahmoud Marei, has conducted expeditions deep into the Sahara and found cave paintings depicting a green landscape with giraffes.

The world can and does change rapidly and, for humans, unpleasantly.

The most startling new evidence came from a third speaker at the conference: Thomas Brophy, an astrophysicist who has worked with the NASA Voyager Project, the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and the Japanese Space program.

In conducting our own researches we have found that the megalithic system and the so-called metric system were used in conjunction during the fourth millennium
BC
. However, we had concluded that it was unlikely that we were looking at a resurrection or revival, rather than a genesis, for these complex concepts. It seemed to us that there must have been some much more advanced progenitor culture somewhere in the distant past. And here, in Rome, we were hearing new ideas that could represent a major missing piece of the jigsaw we were attempting to put together.