The Atlantis Blueprint (15 page)

The beliefs of an early pyramidologist, John Taylor, that the British were the ten lost tribes of Israel led to another highly successful movement, the British Israelites, whose Bible was a vast work by David Davidson called
The Great Pyramid: Its Divine Message
(1924),
³
which announced that the ‘final tribulation’ of the Anglo-Saxon race would last from 1928 to 1936, and that Armageddon would occur in 1953.

According to the British Israelites, another date that would be of immense significance to the world was 16 September 1936. The only newsworthy item that day was that the Duke of Windsor told his prime minister that he intended to marry Mrs Simpson, an interesting but not world-shaking event.

A few ‘pyramidiots’ (as a modern writer has called them) were perhaps a small price to pay for the tremendous impetus given to the study of the pyramids by Taylor and Smyth. They had made a very serious point: the mathematical and technological knowledge revealed by the Great Pyramid seems far too sophisticated for ‘primitives’ who tilled their fields with pointed sticks. If Taylor and Smyth had lived a century later, they might well have preferred the ‘ancient astronaut’ alternative to the idea that the Great Pyramid’s builders worked under the direct guidance of God. Anyone who finds either view unacceptable must be driven to the only other conclusion: that the Egyptians knew far more than historians supposed.

John West expressed the problem in
Serpent in the Sky,
summarising the views of Schwaller de Lubicz:

West argues that it would have been virtually impossible for Egypt to have reached such a degree of sophistication in a mere 500 years – the time Egyptian civilisation is supposed to
have been founded. It is rather, West says, as if the first motor car had been a modern Rolls-Royce.

Scholars in the ancient world should have realised that the builders of the Great Pyramid knew far more than ‘primitives’ were supposed to know – at least, after Agatharchides of Cnidus revealed that the base of the Great Pyramid is a known percentage of the earth’s circumference. But at that time no one knew if this calculation was correct; in fact, no one was interested, for most people thought the earth was flat. By the time of Charles Piazzi Smyth, everyone knew the earth was round, so his revelation that the Egyptians knew the value of pi left Victorian scientists in little doubt that the Egyptians had achieved a sophisticated level of mathematics.

The Great Pyramid continues to offer unsolved mysteries. One modern student, Christopher P. Dunn, consulted a manager of the Indiana Limestone Institute about how long it would take their thirty-three quarries to cut and deliver around 2.5 million blocks, each weighing between 6 and 30 tons, and was told that, using modern rock-cutting machinery, it would take twenty-seven years. But no one has worked out how the builders moved these blocks up a 52-degree slope. Herodotus says that they had a machine made of short wooden planks to lift the blocks, but since the flat top of the ‘step’ is often as little as 6 inches wide this is not practicable. A better suggestion is that they built a gently sloping ramp and heaved the blocks up it with ropes, which would have worked well for the lower courses, but as the Great Pyramid got higher the ramp would have to become longer and steeper and of sufficiently solid construction not to collapse under its own weight. It would need to be about a mile long, and would require as much stone as the structure itself. A modern builder would need a crane more than 500 feet high, with a boom of 400 feet – there is no crane of that size in the world today, and one certainly did not exist in ancient Egypt.

Another problem is the time factor. Herodotus was told that the Great Pyramid took twenty years to build, which would
have involved placing about 340 blocks in position every day, an impossible task without heavy lifting machinery. A more reasonable estimate would be thirty-four blocks a day, but this would mean that it took 200 years to build.

Christopher P. Dunn, the British toolmaker and engineer already mentioned, has examined the Great Pyramid from the engineering point of view. His study led him to conclude – in an article called ‘Advanced Machining in Ancient Egypt’ – that the Egyptian pyramids and temples ‘reveal glimpses of a civilisation that was technically more advanced than is generally believed’. Examining blocks that had been hollowed out with some kind of drill in the Valley Temple, in front of the Sphinx, he noted that the marks left in the hole showed that it was cutting into the rock at a rate of one-tenth of an inch for every revolution of the drill, and he concludes that this could not be achieved by hand. A hole drilled into a rock made of quartz and feldspar provided another strange observation. The drill had cut faster through the quartz than the feldspar, even though quartz is harder than feldspar. Dunn points out that modern ultrasonic machining depends on vibration, like the chisel of a pneumatic drill, which vibrates up and down. An ultrasonic drill vibrates tens of thousands of times faster. Quartz crystals, which can be used to produce ultrasonic sound, also respond to ultrasonic vibrations, which would enable an ultrasonic drill to cut through them faster. Does this suggest that there were ultrasonic drills in ancient Egypt?

The notion sounds ridiculous, yet the mystery of the Great Pyramid led Sir Flinders Petrie, the grand old man of Egyptology, to suggest an idea almost as strange. In his standard work
The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh
(1883),
⁵
he casually threw off the suggestion that the sarcophagus, whose external volume is precisely twice that of its internal volume, was cut with an 8-foot saw that was made of bronze with diamonds in the cutting edge. No such saws, of course, have ever been found; neither have the drills that Petrie thought were used to hollow out the sarcophagus.

Christopher Dunn’s close study of the Pyramid made him aware that its precision seems almost superhuman. He asked an engineer who worked at stone cutting in the quarries of Indiana what tolerances they worked to (i.e., how much inaccuracy did they allow themselves). He was told ‘pretty close’, which was defined as ‘a quarter of an inch’. When told that the blocks of the Great Pyramid were cut to 0.01 tolerance, the stonecutter was incredulous.
⁶

In a TV programme Dunn produced a device used by engineers to test that a metal surface has been machined to a thousandth of an inch, and applied it to the sacred stone called the Benben, in the Cairo Museum. He shone a powerful torch on one side of the metal, and looked on the other side to see if any gleam of light showed through. There was none whatever.

Petrie’s examination of the casing stones of the Great Pyramid showed that they had been cut according to highly accurate engineering tolerances. But why should the Pyramid’s builders have worked to machine-shop tolerances rather than those of a construction site, as you would expect? And even more baffling:
how?
What tools were used to cut granite or limestone with such precision? This is the kind of precision we would expect of an optician, but not a builder.

In trying to fashion a theory that might explain the purpose of the Great Pyramid, Dunn was struck by a comment made by Colonel Howard-Vyse, one of the early explorers who had discovered four of the five ‘relieving chambers’ above the King’s Chamber. Howard-Vyse had noted that when he stood in the King’s Chamber, he was able to hear people speaking in the subterranean chamber, indicating that the acoustics of the Great Pyramid are as perfect as those of a concert hall.

TV producer Boris Said – who, together with John West, made the documentary
The Mystery of the Sphinx
– had said in the promotion material of another documentary:

He went on to mention that a producer of Native American sacred flutes, created to ‘serenade’ Mother Earth, tunes them to the key of F sharp.

This notion that Egyptian pyramids – and temples – are tuned to sound has become increasingly widespread. In November 1998 I joined a trip to Egypt organised by Robert Bauval in which John West acted as tour guide. Together with a number of other writers – among them Robert Temple, Michael Baigent, Yuri Stoyanov and Ralph Ellis – we looked at many Egyptian temples, including Karnak and Luxor, Dendera, Edfu and the Oseirion at Abydos. Again and again we noted their acoustic properties as members of the group intoned notes in closed chambers, or even in doorways. It was as if the stone was a giant tuning fork.

In 1998 scientists at Southampton University discovered that the stones of Stonehenge also have acoustic properties and would have acted as gigantic amplifiers for drums during festivals, their flat surfaces accumulating and then deflecting sound over a wide area.

It was in the immense Temple of Horus, at Edfu, midway between Luxor and Aswan, that my attention was drawn to the
importance of sound. An Egyptian historian named Emil Shaker showed me some hieroglyphics on the wall close to the sanctuary, pointing out how they specified the number of times the temple ritual had to be performed. In this case it was three. He explained: ‘It is no use performing the ritual two or four times. It will not work. If it says three times, it means three times.’ This ritual, like all religious rituals, involves chanting a hymn to the sun and presenting the god with offerings.

I asked, ‘But what does the ritual actually do?’

‘It
activates
the temple.’

‘You mean like switching on a light?’ I said, giving voice to the first image that came into my head.

‘Exactly like switching on a light,’ said Emil.

I found this notion fascinating – a ritual involving chanting could ‘activate’ a temple. Emil made it sound as if it was as automatic as switching on a light, or going through a certain sequence of actions to send an email.

According to my guidebook, John West’s
Traveler’s Key to Ancient Egypt
,
⁸
the Edfu temple was built over a period of 200 years, between 257 and 57
BC,
but part of it dated back to the pyramid age. It is built, of course, on ‘hallowed ground’.

The sanctuary looked rather like an immense stone box turned on its side. I decided to walk all the way around it but found the narrow passage at the back blocked by someone who was obviously meditating, with his forehead and palms pressed against the stone. I realised that it was Michael Baigent, the co-author (with Henry Lincoln and Richard Leigh) of
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.9
I backed away so as not to disturb him, and instead followed John West to look at the famous ‘Building Texts’ inscribed on the walls – texts that refer back to the remote age called the ‘First Time’, when seven sages designed the temples and pyramids.

An hour later, back on the boat, Robert Bauval told me that Michael Baigent had not returned with the rest of us on the bus, and asked me if I could give a lecture in his place that afternoon. Everyone was concerned, since Baigent could only
rejoin us further down the Nile by taking a taxi, and we were in ‘bandit country’ – not long ago, tourists had been machine-gunned to death at the Temple of Hatshepsut. When Michael later turned up unharmed, after I had given his lecture, I asked him what had happened.

‘I don’t know. I was meditating for a few minutes, then I found you’d all gone.’

I told him that I had seen him behind the sanctuary. ‘That wasn’t a few minutes before we left – it was at least twenty minutes.’

He was incredulous. ‘It only seemed a few minutes.’

He may have simply lost track of time, but I am inclined to believe that he had ‘tuned in’ to the vibrations of that hallowed ground, vibrations that are still powerful after more than 2,000 years.

In Bauval and Hancock’s
Keeper of Genesis
I find a quotation from the scholar E. A. E. Reymond, which refers to the ‘founding, building and
bringing to life
[my italics] of the historical temple of Edfu’. This ‘bringing to life’, this activation, is brought about by a ritual that involves sound.

The earth also has its own frequency, known as the Schumann Resonance, which results from electromagnetic activity between the earth and the upper atmosphere. It is far too low in frequency to be heard, but Christopher Dunn found himself speculating whether, if the Great Pyramid was constructed with some ‘sonic’ purpose, as Tom Danley suspected, and if it was deliberately built to correspond to the size of the earth, its purpose might be connected with the earth’s vibrations.

Dunn had already conducted some of his own experiments. In February 1995, when visiting Egypt with Bauval and Hancock, he bribed an inspector to leave him in the King’s Chamber alone for half an hour after it closed to visitors. The inspector assumed he wanted to meditate, and agreed to turn off the lights. In fact, Dunn wanted the lights turned off so that no background hum would spoil his tape recording. He was also carrying a digital frequency counter to measure the
radio frequencies he thought might be generated by the King’s Chamber.