Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology's Greatest Mystery (3 page)

Inside the Great Pyramid the three distinct chambers, somewhat poetically and bearing no relationship to their ancient purpose, are known as the King’s Chamber, the Queen’s Chamber and the Unfinished Chamber. These modern, invented titles help shore up the widely held but entirely erroneous view that Egyptologists understand the intended function of these voids inside the pyramids.

The ‘Unfinished Chamber’ is a particular mystery. It lies 30 m below the surface of the plateau where workers chipped away at the bedrock to cut out what was once thought to have been the original burial chamber for King Khufu. For years Egyptologists claimed the chamber is ‘unfinished’ because Khufu suddenly decided he wanted his burial chamber to be up in the main body of the pyramid rather than below ground. We find it hard to believe that the people who designed Khufu’s pyramid made such a gigantic error, or that Khufu was making up the layout as he went along. ‘I think I’ll have my burial chamber down here. Err, no, on second thoughts maybe it would be nice to have it up here.’ It just does not sound right. Khufu and his architect, Hemiwnu, were so precise in everything they did that we cannot easily accept this explanation.

The mystery of this subterranean vault remains, but at least the orthodox Egyptology establishment has given up trying to sustain the notion that it was some kind of planning error. The powers that be have surrendered on this point, not least because there is also the problem that a similar ‘mistake’ happened with Khafre’s Pyramid, which also has an unfinished subterranean chamber – although not at such great depth.

We had discussed these chambers at length and both of us had a strong feeling that they must have been not only deliberate but also highly important for some reason. After all, they were the first workings to be carried out on the Giza Plateau. We were later to find out that our hunch was right but we could never have guessed just how important these chambers are when it comes to understanding the enormous scale of extreme antiquity.

No one can know for sure, but the Great Pyramid probably did originally contain interesting and valuable artefacts. It was plundered by thieves during the New Kingdom, over 3,000 years ago, leaving only one item in place. The robbers had no interest in trying to extract a large red granite sarcophagus that weighs over three tonnes. It is generally and logically assumed that this stone box once contained the mummified body of Khufu as there is also a sarcophagus in Khafre and Menkaure’s pyramid; or at least there was one in Menkaure’s pyramid, until it was looted by British archaeologists in the early 19th century and lost at sea on its way to a museum in England.

The spellbinding beauty and scale of these three pyramids, along with a raft of unanswered questions, has led to a large number of ideas regarding what they were intended to achieve. These range from the safe assumption that they were simply grand mausoleums for the three named kings, through to wild notions such as the suggestion they were built by aliens or that the structures themselves possess super-advanced technological capabilities of various kinds. There are still people who claim that the building technology employed sprang from nowhere and that we lack the technology to build such edifices even today.

Both of these claims are false. It would be quite possible, albeit with some difficulty and considerable expense, to build the pyramids today. And the notion that the expertise necessary to create these stone giants suddenly appeared is also clearly false. There is ample evidence of an experimental evolution from simple mud-brick tombs that lead over a period of time up to the Great Pyramid itself.

The earliest Egyptians had buried their dead directly into the baking-hot desert sand, where the high, dry temperature desiccates the bodies to effectively mummify them. As the civilization developed, mud-brick structures known as ‘mastabas’ began to appear. These buildings were trapezoid structures – rectangular in plan with inward sloping sides and a flat top. Over time it became the practice to build one slightly smaller mastaba on top of another, which led to the development of the step pyramid (
see
figure 1). There then followed a phase during which the architects improved the design of the step pyramid by adding triangular infills for the saw-tooth sides, leading to the sort of smooth pyramid with which most people are familiar. The later stages of this process actually came about surprisingly rapidly – given the normally ponderous nature of building evolution.

Prior to the modern age, innovation in any architectural styling or technology was a rare event, and one that was usually driven by need rather than a search for aesthetic excellence. The one great exception to this obser-vation was the cathedral-building revolution initiated by the Order of the Knights Templar from
AD
1130 onwards, when both the technology and the beauty of architecture leapt to previously unseen levels – almost overnight.

The first known stepped pyramid was that of Djoser at Saqqara, a few kilometres south of Giza. A series of developmental techniques followed, which included the Pyramid of Meydum, which was still a step pyramid but the stages were becoming so frequent that is was losing its saw-tooth profile. The so-called ‘Bent Pyramid’ at Dashour followed, in which the architects began planning structures with a super-ambitious angle of 60°. However, the realities of physics soon taught these experimental builders to moderate their ambitions and settle for sides that were slightly less steep.

Figure 1.
Diagrams showing the evolution of the pyramids

A ‘smooth-sided pyramid’ appeared not long before the Giza complex was planned. It is known as the ‘Red Pyramid’ and was created at the instructions of King Snefru, who is believed to be the father of Khufu. The Red Pyramid has a slope of just over 43°, which is less that the later Great Pyramid, but it contained many of the architectural features associated with its grander and slightly later counterparts. It was built upon a foundation of stone blocks and contained interior tunnels and chambers of the sort found at Giza.

However, the Great Pyramid of Khufu and its two companion pyramids appear to be much more than just an improvement on their forebears. They have properties that link them to the stars.

•

It is true that there is certainly a reasonably clear evolution of the pyramid builder’s art, but the Giza pyramids are clearly superior both in their scale and build-quality – in addition they exhibit complex features that have no apparent antecedence.

One of the most hotly debated aspects of the Great Pyramid over recent years has been the series of narrow shafts cut into the blocks of rock. There are two in the King’s Chamber, which run steeply upwards to emerge on the outside of the pyramid, not too far from its pinnacle. It was originally suggested that these were simply ventilation shafts but this idea has now been abandoned and it is generally accepted that the shafts had some ceremonial purpose. Experts have observed that the builders of the pyramid must have put a great deal of time and trouble into the integration of these beautifully accurate, narrow tunnels in the mass of stone. It would have been quite impossible to chisel them into the rock after the pyramid was complete because they are far too narrow. The only way they could have been created was ‘layer by layer’, as the pyramid began to grow. There is another pair of shafts in the so-called Queen’s Chamber. These are similar to those in the King’s Chamber but, curiously, they are blocked by squares of limestone deliberately set into the masonry at the time of the pyramid’s construction.

Since the 1960s it has been argued that these shafts are aligned to specific stars – the polestar in the north and Orion’s Belt in the south. Whilst this has been hotly debated, we are unaware of any alternative theory that makes as much sense. The reasons to suspect that it is correct are:

• The Egyptians are believed to have aligned the pyramids to the four cardinal points of the Earth using Thuban, then the polestar, to establish north.

• The stars close to the pole were important to the Egyptians because they never set.
¹
They were therefore described in ancient texts as the ‘imperishable’ or ‘undying’ ones. The kings believed that they too would be ‘imperishable’ after death.

• The constellation of Orion has an important place in Egyptian mythology, being considered to be the soul of Osiris.
²
Traditionally Osiris is considered to be the Lord of the Two Lands: Lord of the Heavens and Lord of the Earth. He was also considered to be Lord of the Dead and in this capacity was always represented in mummy wrappings.

So, the star-alignment theory seems highly reasonable. What about the next theory that came along?

The path that had led us from the rolling green fields of northern Britain to the sandy wastes of Egypt was an entirely logical one based on the work of the well-known pyramid researcher, Robert Bauval – a man who had seen something quite special about the Giza pyramids.

Robert Bauval was born to Belgian parents and brought up in Egypt’s second city of Alexandria, and has spent most of his life living and working in the Middle East. He was always keen on history and had not wasted his spare time amidst the remnants of Egypt’s long and illustrious past. Bauval studied ancient documents, crawled around in old passages and climbed sandy hills in order to better appreciate the skills of his Bronze Age counterparts in construction. He became quite preoccupied with a book called
The Sirius Mystery
, written by the American polymath Robert Temple, that spoke of a very early lost civilization and an ancient understanding of astronomy and mathematics that had been previously unsuspected. Bauval also became interested in the ‘Pyramid Texts’ – a wealth of fables, folk tales and historical accounts that had been painted and carved onto the interior walls of a series of pyramids in Saqqara, close to Cairo.

Ultimately it wasn’t any of the Giza pyramids in isolation that came to fascinate Bauval, but rather the Giza complex as a whole because, in what amounted to a flash of inspiration, he was the first individual to realize that there was something quite unique about the way the three pyramids at Giza had been arranged. As a result, Bauval set out to study the whole arrangement of the Giza Plateau in greater detail.

He came to believe that the three large pyramids on the Giza Plateau were not built in isolation, as were many temples and smaller pyramids surrounding the three significant structures. Walking down what was originally a ceremonial path from the pyramids to where the Nile waters once used to lap one encounters the Great Sphinx – surely one of the most enigmatic and unusual structures ever created. The Sphinx looked out due east across the Nile whilst a line drawn northeast from the Giza pyramids leads, some 8km away, to the site of the ancient city of Lunu, known in the Bible as On, or Heliopolis to the Greeks. This centre of solar worship is now completely lost beneath the urban sprawl of Cairo.

Bauval was troubled by the fact that the Giza pyramids are not quite in a straight line (
see
figure 2) and it was the discrepancy regarding the positioning of the third pyramid that caused him to sit up and make a mental connection. The three pyramids create a pattern that is uncannily like that formed by three of the most famous stars known to humanity throughout its long history – Orion’s Belt.

Best viewed in Western Europe in the winter months, the constellation of Orion contains some of the most significant stars to be seen in our night skies. Amongst these is Sirius, the brightest object we can see apart from the Sun, Moon and some of the solar system’s planets. Higher in the sky than Sirius, and rising well before it, are the three stars known as Orion’s Belt.

These stars – Mintaka, Alnilam and Alnitak – are all bright and very conspicuous to anyone viewing the sky. They have been known to every civilization, and by a wealth of names. Some peoples have called them a string of pearls, three beautiful maidens or, in the case of Greek sky watchers, the belt of the great hero and hunter Orion. But everyone who looked at Orion’s Belt could not fail to realize that they point towards the rising of Sirius, which is the greatest star of them all and cannot be mistaken for any other. Follow the three stars of Orion’s Belt down towards the horizon and you are bound to come upon the silver-white orb of Sirius, which has probably been venerated by humanity since our forebears first lifted their heads to admire the heavens.