Pyramid Quest (18 page)

Reconstruction of the lower portion of the Great Pyramid as an astronomical observatory. (
From Proctor, 1883, frontispiece.
)

The pyramid’s utility for star mapping would have been augmented by placing observers on the flat platform of the structure, where wooden posts or other markers designated the cardinal directions. There they could have recorded the risings and settings of the stars, data that were then combined with the meridian observations of the other observers stationed inside the Grand Gallery to complete the star map. Knowing the positions of the fixed stars, ancient astronomers could have also traced the paths of the planets, which moved according to very different dynamics from those driving the zodiac and the other constellations.

The Grand Gallery’s contributions didn’t end with the stars and the planets. It also furthered knowledge of the sun’s movements. The falling rays of midday sunlight on midsummer’s and midwinter’s days and on the vernal and autumnal equinox would have set up distinct and useful patterns of light and shadow and told the users of the Great Pyramid’s astronomical observatory where they stood in the turn of the year.

Vertical north-south section of the Great Pyramid through the Grand Gallery, Ascending and Descending passages, and Queen’s Chamber, illustrating how a partially completed Great Pyramid could be used as an astronomical observatory. (
From Proctor, 1883, facing page 155.
)

A contemporary of Proctor, Sir Norman Lockyer (1836-1920), devoted most of his astronomical career to studying the sun. He was director of the solar physics observatory at England’s Royal College of Science, leader of eight British government expeditions to observe total solar eclipses, and winner of a medal from the French government for codiscovery of the spectroscopic method of observing solar prominences in daylight. But there was another aspect to his career. Lockyer focused on the astronomical connections of ancient monuments, looking at Stonehenge in his native land and also directing his attention to Greek and Egyptian temples. His books and papers, including
Dawn of Astronomy,
published in 1894, conferred upon Lockyer scholarly status as one of the founders of archaeoastronomy, the discipline that investigates the relationships between ancient monuments and the skies of their times. Much of our contemporary understanding of Stonehenge began with Lockyer’s pioneering work.

Lockyer made two fundamental findings in his work on Egypt. The first reinforced Proctor’s argument. Many Egyptian monuments, Lockyer realized, were oriented to the heavens, whether sun or stars. His second discovery was that the Egyptians knew that the skies were anything but constant. They changed, slowly to be sure, but changed nonetheless.

Heading for Egypt on his academic summer holidays, Lockyer began his research at the temple of Amen-Ra at Karnak. The temple was built in such a way that on the summer solstice—the longest day of the year, or the day with the greatest length and extent of sunlight—the sun’s rays entered the temple at sunset, traversed its length along the building’s axis, and penetrated the sanctuary. Working backward from his knowledge of the slowly changing tilt of the earth’s axis, Lockyer estimated that the Karnak temple, or at least the original foundation upon which it is built, had been erected circa 3700 B.C., as opposed to the currently widely accepted dating of much of this temple, which was continually being built and rebuilt, to the Middle Kingdom through Greek period, circa 2000 to 300 B.C.

Other temples, Lockyer argued, were oriented to the points where certain stars rise just before sunrise—a phenomenon called heliacal rising—on the vernal equinox. Among these stars was the one we know as Sirius, the Dog Star, the brightest star in the sky, forming part of the constellation Canis Major, which is located near the constellation we call Orion. The ancient Egyptians knew Orion as Osiris, their great god, and Sirius was the star of Isis, Osiris’s wife and goddess mother of all Egypt.

There is an issue with orienting a temple to a star’s heliacal rising on the vernal equinox, however: the star’s orientation changes over the centuries. The reason is a complex intersection of natural phenomena.

Our planet isn’t really round. It flattens at the poles and bulges at the equator, so that a radius drawn from the earth’s center to the equator is about 14 miles longer than one drawn to either pole. This extra roll around the middle makes the earth not a true sphere but, technically, an oblate spheroid. In addition, the earth’s axis of rotation tips relative to the plane (or ecliptic) of its orbit around the sun. The sun, the moon and, to a much smaller degree, the other planets tug gravitationally on the greater mass of the earth’s bulging equatorial middle and slowly move the axis of rotation. Because of these forces, the earth spins not like a wheel on an axle, around and around in the same plane, but like a top wobbling across a table or floor.

This slow wobbling movement is called precession, and it affects how we on Earth see events in the heavens. The stars slowly shift relative to the celestial north and south poles and trace paths that come full circle about every 26,000 years. For example, in 12,000 B.C., the North Star was Vega. In 3000 B.C., the closest candidate was Alpha Draconis. At the height of Greek civilization in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C., the North Star was Beta Ursae Minoris. Currently the North Star is Polaris (also known as Alpha Ursae Minoris), at the tip of the constellation of Ursa Minor (also known as the Little Bear or the Little Dipper). By about A.D. 14,000, Vega will again occupy the position of North Star, as the precessional circle closes.

Precession affects not only the position of the North Star but also the relative positions of the constellations. Over time, constellations rise in new points on the eastern horizon, then follow new paths across the meridian to changed setting points in the west. And precession affects the position of the stars relative to the sun, a phenomenon that is often most carefully observed on the spring equinox. In our era, the sun rises in the constellation of Pisces on the spring equinox; This is why, by the conventions of astrology, we live in the precessional age of Pisces, which began in about 60 B.C. The next precessional age, Aquarius, will commence when the sun first comes up against that constellation, sometime between A.D. 2060 and 2100, depending on the method of calculation.

Historical convention confers the honor for detecting precession to Hipparchus, a brilliant Hellenistic mathematician and astronomer of the second century B.C. Watching the sky one night, Hipparchus saw a star where he was certain no star had been charted before. He carefully catalogued the nearly 1,100 fixed stars he knew, positioned them by celestial longitude and latitude, then compared his star chart with one made by a Greek astronomer some 150 years earlier. Calculating that all the stars had shifted position by approximately 2° in the intervening time, Hipparchus named the change precession.

It is hard to believe, though, that the Egyptians, with their careful observations of the heliacal risings of key stars, didn’t know about precession long before the idea first came to Hipparchus. In fact, the Egyptians routinely reoriented star temples every 200 to 300 years, when precession had disconnected a temple from the star it was built to mark. The great temple of Luxor, Lockyer discovered, had undergone four distinct changes of orientation as it was built and rebuilt over the centuries. “This change of direction,” Lockyer wrote, “is one of the most striking things which have been observed for years past in Egyptian temples.”
⁴

Because he understood precession’s effect on the positions of sun and stars, Lockyer could date temples and other structures by determining when the skies fit their specific orientations, and the dates he came to were often considerably older than the standard Egyptological beliefs. The ancient Egyptians were very probably doing the same thing—that is, aligning with astronomical objects, in order to memorialize the changing heavens—in monuments other than their temples, including, perhaps, the Great Pyramid.

Lockyer’s work met considerable academic resistance from classical Egyptologists of the time, especially since they were generally not trained as scientists; and for some decades afterward, archaeoastronomy was little honored and less pursued. The field wasn’t resurrected until the late twentieth century, and then was popularized in large part by the work of a nonacademic aficionado of the Great Pyramid who paid careful attention to an oddity of Giza: the three pyramids don’t line up.

The effect is most pronounced in an image of the pyramids taken from above. Take a ruler or straight edge, and connect the apexes of the Khufu and Khafre pyramids, and you’ll notice that the Menkaure pyramid sits well off the line. As attentive as the pyramid builders were to cardinal directions, perfect squares, and precise corners, this divergence must have been intentional. But why did the pyramid builders purposely misalign the three pyramids of Giza?

The answer came to Robert Bauval, a construction engineer of Belgian background who was born in Egypt. As he looked up at the stars one night in the startlingly clear skies of the Arabian Desert, a friend pointed out that the three stars forming Orion’s Belt are offset. The dimmest of the three lies at a slight distance from the axis formed by the two brighter stars. Suddenly Bauval realized he had the model for the site plan that placed the three Giza pyramids in their curious, intended positions: the three pyramids replicated Orion’s Belt in both alignment and relative size.

There was nothing arbitrary or trivial about this choice. The people of the Old Kingdom recognized some of the same constellations we do, but they knew them by different names. Our Orion was their Osiris, an identification that takes us to the core of religious belief in the third and fourth millennia B.C. In the religious mythology that underpinned ancient Egypt, the story of Osiris was the key myth, as central as the story of Jesus to Christianity or Moses and the Exodus to Judaism.

Osiris was the eldest son of Nut, goddess of the sky, a man as well as a god. He became ruler of Egypt and, following the royal custom, married his sister Isis. Osiris was the essence of the good king. He spread
ma’at
(truth and justice) throughout the kingdom and through his vizier, the equally divine Thoth, taught humans the arts of civilization, prosperity, and happiness. However, Osiris’s goodness angered his brother Seth (also known as Set). Seth murdered Osiris treacherously and cut his body into small pieces, which he scattered across Egypt.

Isis gathered all the many pieces of Osiris’s corpse from the far corners of the country and reassembled them. Then, in the brief span of life this return to wholeness afforded her husband, Isis coupled with Osiris and became pregnant with their child. His task on earth done, Osiris transformed himself into a star being—the constellation we know as Orion—while Isis, her body swelling with a son who would be called Horus, took refuge in the Nile marshes to escape Seth. Horus grew into a powerful young prince who challenged Seth to personal combat to determine who should rule Egypt. The fight was fearsome: Horus lost an eye, and Seth’s testicles were torn off. Horus was the victor and became the pharaoh of Egypt.

This story, with its themes of the battle of good and evil, of dismemberment and rejoining, and of revenge and the return of justice across the generations, created the religious ethic of the pharaoh’s rule. Each subsequent pharaoh, including Khufu, saw himself as the reincarnation of Horus, the fighter who struggles to reestablish balance and good order. At his death, the Horus-king was transformed into Osiris and, like the first god of the Egyptian pantheon, took his place among the stars.

In the years following that clear Arabian night, Bauval joined forces with author Adrian Gilbert, set about writing
The Orion Mystery,
and furthered his research into the Great Pyramid’s Osiris-Orion connection. Bauval realized that the star map of Orion extended beyond Giza to encompass all the major pyramids coming up the Nile from Dashur to Abu Roash, with the Nile itself standing in for the Milky Way. That was the big picture. On a smaller scale, he made note of the fact that the shafts extending through the Great Pyramid from the King’s and Queen’s chambers lined up with stars that furthered the Orion connection. The northern shaft from the King’s Chamber pointed to Alpha Draconis, the southern shaft pointed to Orion’s Belt. In the case of the two Queen’s Chamber shafts, the northern pointed on the correct bearing for Beta Ursae Minoris, and the southern for Sirius, which was sacred to Isis. By Bauval’s calculations, these alignments fit the sky in approximately 2450 B.C., close to the conventional date assigned for the construction of the Great Pyramid and an apparent corroboration of the Egyptological orthodoxy.

But that wasn’t all, as became clear when Bauval explored the position of the stars, taking precession into account and going back thousands of years. Returning to the epoch of circa 10,400 B.C., Bauval found that “the pattern of Orion’s Belt seen on the ‘west’ of the Milky Way matches, with uncanny precision, the pattern and alignments of the three Giza pyramids!”
⁵
Bauval continues: “In
c.
2450 B.C., when the Great Pyramid was built, the correlation was experienced when Orion’s Belt was seen in the east at the moment of heliacal rising of Sirius, the perfect ‘meridian to meridian’ patterns, i.e., when the two images [terrestrial and celestial] superimpose in perfect match; this is when we see the First Time of Orion’s Belt in
c.
10450 B.C.,” a date that marks the “start of the great precessional cycle at 10450 B.C.”
⁶
Knowing precession and following a master plan handed down through the millennia, were the Fourth Dynasty Egyptians recording, memorializing, and reconfirming the period of the so-called First Time of Osiris (c. 10,400-10,500 B.C.) in the positions of their great architectural achievements on the Giza Plateau? This appears to be the case.