From Atlantis to the Sphinx (11 page)

On the night of 12 February 1837, Howard-Vyse entered the Pyramid at night, accompanied by an engineer named John Perring, and went to examine a crack that had developed in a granite block above and to one side of Davison’s Chamber; a three-foot reed could be pushed straight through it, which suggested there might be another chamber above. The very next morning, Howard-Vyse dismissed Caviglia, and appointed Perring to his team.

Howard-Vyse’s workmen now began to try to cut their way through the granite at the side of Davison’s Chamber. It proved more difficult than he had expected, and a month later he had still made little headway. Royal visitors came, and Howard-Vyse had little to show them except ‘Campbell’s Tomb’, which Caviglia had discovered near one of the other Giza pyramids. (He also tried boring into the shoulder of the Sphinx, looking for masons’ markings, but was unsuccessful.) Finally, in desperation, he employed small charges of gunpowder—which made granite fly around like shrapnel—and managed to open a small passage up from out of Davison’s Chamber.

Oddly enough, Howard-Vyse then dismissed the foreman of the workmen. The next day, a candle on the end of a stick revealed that Caviglia had been right; there
was
another hidden chamber above.

The hole was further enlarged with gunpowder. The first to enter it was Howard-Vyse, accompanied by a local copper mill employee and well-known ‘fixer’ named J. R. Hill. What they found was another low chamber—only three feet high—whose irregular floor was covered with thick black dust, made of the cast-off shells of insects. To Howard-Vyse’s disappointment, it was completely empty. Howard-Vyse decided to call it Wellington’s Chamber.

The hole was enlarged yet again, and the next time Howard-Vyse entered it, with John Perring, and another engineer named Mash, they discovered a number of marks painted in a kind of red pigment, daubed on the walls. These were ‘quarry marks’, marks painted on the stones when they were still in the quarry, to show where they had to go in the Pyramid. Conveniently enough, none of these marks appeared on the end wall, through which Howard-Vyse had smashed his way. But there was something more exciting than mere quarry marks—a series of hieroglyphs in an oblong-shaped box (or cartouche)—which meant the name of a pharaoh. Oddly enough, Howard-Vyse had failed to notice these when he first entered the chamber.

From the fact that Wellington's Chamber was almost identical with Davison’s underneath it, Howard-Vyse reasoned that there must be more above. It took four and a half months of blasting to discover these—three more chambers on top of one another. The topmost chamber, which Howard-Vyse called ‘Campbell’s Chamber’, had a roof that sloped to a point, like the roof of a house. All the chambers had more quarry markings, and two of them—including Campbell’s Chamber—had more names in cartouches. As in Wellington’s Chamber, these marks were never on the wall through which Howard-Vyse had broken...

The purpose of these chambers was now apparent: to relieve the pressure of masonry on the King’s Chamber below. If there was an earthquake that shook the Pyramid, the vibration would not be transmitted through solid masonry to the King’s Chamber. In fact, there
had
been an earthquake, as the cracks in the granite revealed, and the secret chambers had served their purpose and prevented the King’s Chamber from collapsing.

When copies of the quarry marks and inscriptions were sent to the British Museum, the hieroglyphics expert Samuel Birch testified that one of the names written in a cartouche, and found in Campbell’s Chamber, was that of the Pharaoh Khufu. So, at last, someone had proved that Cheops built the Great Pyramid, and Howard-Vyse had earned himself immortality among Egyptologists.

But Samuel Birch admitted that there were certain things about the inscriptions that puzzled him. To begin with, many were upside-down. Moreover, although the script was—obviously—supposed to be from the time of Cheops, around 2500 BC, it looked as if many of the symbols came from a much later period, when hieroglyphics had ceased to be ‘pictures’, and become something more like cursive writing. Many of the hieroglyphs were unknown—or written by someone so illiterate that they could hardly be deciphered. This in itself was baffling. Early hieroglyphic writing was a fine art, and only highly trained scribes had mastered it. These hieroglyphs looked as if they had been scrawled by the ancient Egyptian equivalent of Just William.

Most puzzling of all,
two
pharaohs seemed to be named in the cartouches—Khufu and someone called Khnem-khuf. Who was this Khnem-khuf? Later Egyptologists were agreed that he was supposed to be another pharaoh—and not just some variant on Khufu—yet the puzzling thing was that his name appeared in chambers
lower
than Campbell’s Chamber, implying that Khnem-Khuf had started the Pyramid and Khufu had completed it (since a pyramid is built from the bottom up). It was an embarrassing puzzle for archaeologists.

The answer to this puzzle has been suggested by the writer Zechariah Sitchin. Unfortunately, his solution will never be taken seriously by scholars or archaeologists, because Mr Sitchin, like Erich von Daniken, belongs to the fraternity who believe that the pyramids were built by visitors from outer space, ‘ancient astronauts’. Sitchin’s own highly individual version of this theory is expounded in a series of books called
The Earth Chronicles
. These have failed to achieve the same widespread impact as Daniken’s because Sitchin is almost obsessively scholarly; he can read Egyptian hieroglyphics, and he overloads his chapters with archaeological details that sometimes make them hard going. But no matter how one feels about his theory that ‘gods’ came to earth from a ‘12th planet’ nearly half a million years ago, there can be no doubt that he has an extremely acute mind, and that his erudition is enormous. And what he has to say about Howard-Vyse goes straight to the point.

Sitchin points out that no marks of any kind were found in Davison’s Chamber, discovered in 1765—only in those discovered by Howard-Vyse. And, noting that Howard-Vyse dismissed Caviglia the day after his secret visit to Davison’s Chamber, and his foreman on the day the workmen broke through into Wellington’s Chamber, he concludes reasonably that Howard-Vyse preferred not to be observed by anyone who had his wits about him. He notes that Hill was allowed to wander in and out of the newly discovered chambers freely, and that it was he who first copied the quarry marks and other inscriptions.

The atmosphere that surrounded Vyse’s operations in those hectic days is well described by the Colonel himself. Major discoveries were being made all around the pyramids, but not within them. Campbell’s Tomb, discovered by the detested Caviglia, was yielding not only artefacts but also masons’ markings and hieroglyphics in red paint. Vyse was becoming desperate to achieve his own discovery. Finally he broke through to hitherto unknown chambers; but they only duplicated one after the other a previously discovered chamber (Davison’s) and were bare and empty. What could he show for all the effort and expenditure? For what would he be honoured, by what would he be remembered?
We know from Vyse’s chronicles that, by day, he had sent in Mr Hill to inscribe the chambers with the names of the Duke of Wellington and Admiral Nelson, heroes of the victories over Napoleon. By night, we suspect, Mr Hill also entered the chambers, to ‘christen’ the pyramid with the cartouches of its presumed ancient builder.
²

The problem was that in the 1830s, knowledge of hieroglyphics was still minimal (the Rosetta Stone, with its parallel inscriptions in Greek and ancient Egyptian, had only been discovered in 1799). One of the few books that Hill might have consulted would be Sir John Wilkinson’s
Materia Hieroglyphica
, and even Wilkinson was uncertain about the reading of royal names.

Sitchin suggests that what happened is that Hill inscribed the name that Wilkinson thought was Khufu, and then Howard-Vyse heard that a new work by Wilkinson, the three-volume
Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians
, published earlier that year, had just reached Cairo. Howard-Vyse and Hill did some frantic—and unexplained—commuting between Giza and Cairo soon after the discovery of the chamber named after Lady Arbuthnot. They must have been dismayed to find that Wilkinson had changed his mind about how Khufu was spelt, and that Hill had inscribed the wrong name in the lower chambers. They hastened to put right this appalling blunder in the newly discovered Campbell’s Chamber, and at last the correct spelling of Khufu appeared.

But what they did not know was that Wilkinson was still incorrect. The ‘Kh’ of Khufu should be rendered by a symbol like a small circle with lines hatched across it—a sieve. Wilkinson, and a Frenchman named Laborde (who had also written about hieroglyphs in a travel book) made the mistake of rendering this as a sun-disc—a circle with a dot in the middle. In fact, this was the name for the sun god Ra. So instead of writing ‘Khufu’, the forger wrote ‘Raufu’. No ancient Egyptian would have made such an appalling and blasphemous error.

But what about the red paint? Would it not be obvious that the inscriptions were modern, and not more than four thousand years old? No. The same red ochre paint was still used by the Arabs, and Perring noted that it was hard to distinguish ancient quarry marks from new ones. (In the same way, many Cro-Magnon cave paintings look as fresh as if they were made yesterday.)

Sitchin notes that Mr Hill, who had been a mere copper mill employee when Howard-Vyse met him, became the owner of the Cairo Hotel when Howard-Vyse left Egypt, and that Howard-Vyse thanks him effusively in his book. Howard-Vyse himself had spent ten thousand pounds—an incredible sum—on his excavations. But the black sheep was able to return to his family as a famous scholar and discoverer.

It is Sitchin’s intention to try to prove that the Great Pyramid was built in some remote age, at the time of the Sphinx. This would seem to be a reasonable assumption—except that carbon-dating tests on organic material found in the mortar of the Great Pyramid seem to indicate that its date was—give or take a century or so—the middle of the third millennium BC. (We shall see later that there is another reason—the astronomical alignment of the ‘air vents’ in the King’s Chamber—for accepting the conventional dating.) It is nevertheless worth bearing in mind the curious tale of how Egyptologists came to accept that the Great Pyramid was built by Khufu, and to draw from it the moral that, where ancient civilisations are concerned, nothing should be taken for granted unless it is based on hard scientific evidence.

Mr Hill, at least, had one genuine discovery to his credit. John Greaves had noted two nine-inch openings in the walls of the King’s Chamber, and speculated that they were air vents. It was Hill who, two centuries later, clambered up the outside of the Pyramid and found the outlets that proved that they were air vents. When they were cleared of debris, a cool breeze rushed down them, keeping the King’s Chamber at a constant 68 degrees Fahrenheit, no matter what the temperature outside. Again, this only seemed to increase the mystery. Why should the ancient Egyptians want a chamber kept at exactly 68 degrees? One of the scholars Napoleon had taken with him to Egypt in 1798, Edmé-François Jomard, speculated that the Chamber might be a storage place for measuring instruments, which would need to be kept at a constant temperature. But this theory failed to explain why, in that case, the King’s Chamber had to be virtually inaccessible. Or why it had to be approached by a long, slippery gallery of smooth limestone rather than a sensible staircase.

It is difficult for a reader, who has to rely on facts and figures printed in a book, to realise how much more baffling the Great Pyramid is when confronted in its overwhelming reality. In
Fingerprints of the Gods
, Graham Hancock conveys something of his own bewilderment as he repeats: ‘All was confusion. All was paradox. All was mystery.’ For the inner architecture of the Pyramid simply fails to make sense. Everything has an air of precision, of some exact purpose; yet it is impossible to begin to guess the nature of this purpose. For example, the ‘walls’ or ramps on either side of the ‘slot’ at the centre of the Grand Gallery have a series of slots cut into them. These
could
be to help the climber. But why are the holes of two different lengths, alternately long and short, and why do the short ones slope, while the long ones are horizontal? And why does the sloping length of the short holes equal the horizontal length of the long holes? It is as if the place had been designed by an insane mathematician.

To see these vast blocks—some weighing as much as 70 tons—all laid in place as neatly as if they were ordinary-sized builder’s bricks, brings an overwhelming sense of the incredible skill involved. Medieval cathedrals were built by masons who devoted their lives to the study of their craft, and who apparently incorporated as many mysterious measurements as the Great Pyramid. But cathedral building lasted for centuries, and there were so many that the masons had plenty of time to practise their craft. The pyramids of Giza were preceded—according to the history books—by a few cruder examples like the Step Pyramid at Saqqara and the Bent Pyramid at Dahshur. Where did the Great Pyramid’s craftsmen learn their skill?

Again, why was the Great Pyramid so bleak and bare, like a geometrical demonstration? Why were there none of the wall decorations that we associate with Egyptian temples? As we saw in the last chapter, even an object as simple as the sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber presented impossible technical problems, so that Flinders Petrie speculated that it had been cut out of the granite by bronze saws studded with diamonds, and hollowed out by some totally unknown ‘drill’ made of a tube with a saw edge tipped with diamonds. Moreover (as we saw in the last chapter), swan-necked vases, cut out of basalt, quartz and diorite with some unknown tool, seem to prove conclusively that there was a highly sophisticated civilisation in Egypt long before the First Dynasty. This is not some Daniken-like crankery, but hard evidence that Egyptologists refuse to face squarely.