FINGERPRINTS OF
THE GODS
Graham Hancock
1995
Page 338
"... What was this
meticulous interest in the angle of 26°, and was it a
coincidence that it amounted to half of the angle of
inclination of the pyramid's sides - 52°.10
The reader may recall the
significance of this angle. It was a key ingredient of the
sophisticated and advanced formula by which the design of
the Great Pyramid had been made to correspond precisely to
the dynamics of spherical geometry. Thus the original height
of the monument (481.3949 feet), and the perimeter of its
base (3023.16 feet), stood in the same ratio to each other
as did the radius of a sphere to its circumference. This
ratio was 2pi (2 x 3.14) and to express it the builders had
been obliged to specify the tricky and idiosyncratic angle
of 52° for the pyramid's sides (since any greater or
lesser slope would have meant a different
height-to-perimeter ratio).
In Chapter Twenty-three
we saw that the so-called Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan
in Mexico also expressed a knowledge and deliberate use of
the transcendental number pi; in its case the height (233.5
feet) stood in a relationship of 4pi to the perimeter of its
base (2932.76 feet).11
The crux, therefore, was
that the most remarkable monument of Ancient Egypt and the
most remarkable monument of Ancient Mexico both incorporated
pi relationships long before and far away from the official
'discovery' of this transcendental number by the Greeks.12
Moreover, the evidence invited the conclusion that something
was being signalled by the use of pi - almost certainly the
same thing in both cases.
Not for the first time,
and not for the last, I was overwhelmed by a sense of
contact with an ancient intelligence, not necessarily
Egyptian or Mexican, which had found a way to reach out
across the ages and draw people towards it like a beacon.
Some might look for treasure; others, captivated by the
deceptively simple manner in which the builders had used pi
to demonstrate their mastery of the secrets of
transcendental numbers, might be inspired to search for
further mathematical epiphanies.
Bent almost double, my
back brushing against the polished limestone ceiling, it was
with such thoughts in my mind that I began to scramble up
the 26° slope of the ascending. corridor, w:hich seemed
to penetrate the vast bulk of the six million ton buildmg
like a '
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trigonometrical device.
After I had banged my head on-its ceiling a couple of times,
however, I began to wonder why the ingenious people who'd
designed it hadn't made it two or three feet higher. If they
could erect a monument like this in the first place (which
they obviously could) and equip it with corridors, surely it
would not have been beyond their capabilities to make those
corridors roomy enough to stand up in? Once again I was
tempted to conclude that it was the result of a deliberate
decision by the pyramid builders: they had made the
ascending corridor this way because they had wanted it this
way (rather than because such a design had been forced upon
them.)
Was there motive in the
apparent madness of these archaic mind games?
Page number 346
(omitted)
Chapter 38
Interactive
Three-Dimensional Game
Reaching the top of the
Grand Gallery, I clambered over a chunky granite step about
three feet high. I remembered that it lay, like the roof of
the Queen's Chamber, exactly along the east-west axis of the
Great Pyramid, And therefore marked the point of transition
between the northern and southern halves of the monument.'
Somewhat like an altar in appearance, the step also provided
a solid horizontal platform immediately in front of the low
square tunnel that served as the entrance to the King's
Chamber.
Pausing for a moment, I
looked back down the Gallery, taking in once again its lack
of decoration, its lack of religious iconography, and its
absolute lack of any of the recognizable symbolism normally
associated with the archaic belief system of the Ancient
Egyptians. All that registered upon the eye, along the
entire 153-foot length of this magnificent geometrical
cavity, was its disinterested regularity and its stark
machinelike simplicity.
Looking up, I could just
make out the opening of a dark aperture, chiselled into the
top of the eastern wall above my head. Nobody knew when or
by whom this foreboding hole had been cut, or how deep it
had originally penetrated. It led to the first of the five
relieving chambers above the King's Chamber and had been
extended in 1837 when Howard Vyse had used it to break
through to the remaining four. Looking down again, I could
just make out the point at the bottom of the Gallery's
western wall where the near-vertical well-
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shaft began its
precipitous 160 foot descent through the core of the pyramid
to join the descending corridor far below
ground-level.
Why would such a
complicated apparatus of pipes and passageways have been
required? At first sight it didn't make sense. But then
nothing about the Great Pyramid did make much sense, unless
you were prepared to devote a great deal of attention to it.
In unpredictable ways, when you did that, it would from time
to time reward you.
If you were sufficiently
numerate, for example, as we have seen, it would respond to
your basic inquiries into its height and base perimeter by
'printing out' the value of pi. And if you were prepared to
investigate further, as we shall see, it would download
other useful mathematical tit-bits, each a little more
complex and abstruse that its predecessor.
There was a programmed
feel about this whole process, as though it had been
carefully prearranged. Not for the first time, I found
myself willing to consider the possibility that the pyramid
might have been designed as a gigantic challenge or learning
machine - or, better still, as an interactive
three-dimensional puzzle set down in the desert for humanity
to solve.
Antechamber
Just over 3 feet 6 inches
high, the entry passage to the King's Chamber required all
humans of normal stature to stoop. About four feet farther
on, however, I reached the 'Antechamber', where the roof
level rose suddenly to 12 feet above the floor. The east and
west walls of the Antechamber were composed of red granite,
into which were cut four opposing pairs of wide parallel
slots, assumed by Egyptolo- gists to have held thick
portcullis slabs: Three of these pairs of slots extended all
the way to the floor, and were empty. The fourth (the
northernmost) had been cut down only as far as the roof
level of the entry passage (that is, 3 feet 6 inches above
floor level) and still contained a hulking sheet of granite,
perhaps nine inches thick and six feet high. There was a
horizontal space of only 21 inches between this suspended
stone portcullis and the northern end of the entry passage
from which I had just emerged. There was also a gap of a
little over 2 feet deep between the top of the portcullis
and the ceiling. Whatever
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function it was designed
to serve it was hard to agree with the Egyptologists that
this peculiar structure could have been intended to deny
access to tomb robbers.
Genuinely puzzled, I
ducked under it and then stood up again in the southern
portion of the Antechamber, which was some 10 feet long and
maintained the same roof height of 12 feet. Though much
worn, the grooves for the three further 'portcullis' slabs
were still visible in the eastern and western walls. There
was no sign of the slabs themselves and, indeed, it was
difficult to see how such cumbersone pieces of stone could
have been installed in so severely constricted a working
space.
I remembered that
Flinders Petrie, who had systematically surveyed the entire
Giza necropolis in the late nineteenth century, had
commented on a similar puzzle in the Second Pyramid: 'The
granite portcullis in the lower passage shows great skill in
moving masses, as it would need 40 or 60 men to lift it; yet
it has been moved,
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and raised into place, in
a narrow passage, where only a few men could possibly reach
it.,3 Exactly the same observations applied to the
portcullis slabs of the Great Pyramid. If they were
portcullis slabs - gateways capable of being raised and
lowered.
The problem was that the
physics of raising and lowering them required they be
shorter than the full height of the Antechamber, so that
they could be drawn into the roof space to allow the entry
and exit of legitimate individuals prior to the closure of
the tomb. This meant, of course, that when the bottom edges
of the slabs were lowered to the floor to block the
Antechamber at that level, an equal and opposite space would
have opened up between the top edges of the slabs and the
ceiling, through which any enterprising tomb-robber would
certainly have been able to climb.
The Antechamber clearly
qualified as another of the pyramid's many thought-provoking
paradoxes, in which complexity of struc- ture was combined
with apparent pointlessness of function.
An exit tunnel, the same
height and width as the entrance tunnel and lined with solid
red granite, led off from the Antechamber's southern wall
(also made of granite but incorporating a 12-inch thick
limestone layer at its very top). After about a further 9
feet the tunnel debouched into the King's Chamber, a massive
sombre red room made entirely of granite, which radiated an
atmosphere of prodigious energy and power.
Stone
enigmas
I moved into the centre
of the King's Chamber, the long axis of which was perfectly
oriented east to west while the short axis was equally
perfectly oriented north to south. The room was exactly 19
feet 1 inch in height and formed a precise two-by-one
rectangle measuring 34 feet 4 inches long by 17 feet 2
inches wide. With a floor consisting of 15 massive granite
paving stones, and walls composed of 100 gigantic granite
blocks, each weighing 70 tons or more and laid in five
courses, and with a ceiling spanned by nine further granite
blocks each weighing aproximately 50 tons,4 the effect was
of intense and overwhelming compression.
At the Chamber's western
end was the object which, if the
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Egyptologists were to be
believed, the entire Great Pyramid, had been built to house.
That object, carved out of one piece of dark
chocolate-coloured granite containing peculiarly hard
granules of feldspar, quartz and mica, was the lidless
coffer presumed to have been the sarcophagus of Khufu.s Its
interior measurements were 6 feet 6.6 inches in length, 2
feet 10.42 inches in depth, and 2 feet 2.81 inches in width.
Its exterior measurements were 7 feet 5.62 inches in length,
3 feet 5.31 inches in depth, and 3 feet 2.5 inches in width6
an inch too wide, incidentally, for it to have been carried
up through the lower (and now plugged) entrance to the
ascending corridor.'
Some routine mathematical
games were built into the dimensions of the sarcophagus. For
example, it had an internal volume of 1 166.4 litres and an
external volume of exactly twice that 2332.8 litres.8 Such a
precise coincidence could not have been arrived at
accidentally: the walls of the coffer had been cut to
machine-age tolerances by craftsmen of enormous skill and
experience. It seemed, moreover, as Flinders Petrie admitted
with some puzzlement after completing his painstaking survey
of the Great Pyramid, that these craftsmen had access to
tools 'such as we ourselves have only now reinvented. .
.'9
Petrie examined the
sarcophagus particularly closely and reported that it must
have been cut out of its surrounding granite block with
straight saws '8 feet or more in length'. Since the granite
was extremely hard, he could only assume that these saws
must have had bronze blades (the hardest metal then
supposedly available) inset with 'cutting points' made of
even harder jewels: 'The character of the work would
certainly seem to point to diamond as being the cutting
jewel; and only the considerations of its rarity in general,
and its absence from Egypt, interfere with this conclusion.
. .'10
An even bigger mystery
surrounded the hollowing out of the sarcophagus, obviously a
far more difficult enterprise than separating it from a
block of bedrock. Here Petrie concluded that the Egyptians
must have:
adapted their sawing
principle into a circular instead of a rectilinear form,
curving the blade round into a tube, which drilled out a
circular groove by its rotation; thus by breaking away the
cores left in such grooves, they were able to hollow out
large holes with a minimum of
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labour. These tubular
drills varied from 1/4 inch to 5 inches diameter, and from
1/30 to 1/5 inch thick.. .11
Of course, as Petrie
admitted, no actual jewelled drills or saws had ever been
found by Egyptologists. 12 The visible evidence of the kinds
of drilling and sawing that had been done, however,
compelled him to infer that such instruments must have
existed. He became especially interested in this and
extended his study to include not only the King's Chamber
sarcophagus but many other granite artefacts and granite
'drill cores' which he collected at Giza. The deeper his
research, however, the more puzzling the stone-cutting
technology of the Ancient Egyptians became:
The amount of pressure,
shown by the rapidity with which the drills and saws pierced
through the hard stones, is very surprising; probably a load
of at least a ton or two was placed on the 4-inch drills
cutting in granite. On the granite core No 7 the spiral of
the cut sinks 1 inch in the circumference of 6 inches, a
rate of ploughing out which is astonishing. . . These rapid
spiral grooves cannot be ascribed to anything but the
descent of the drill into the granite under enormous
pressure. . .13
Wasn't it peculiar that
at the supposed dawn of human civilization, more than 4500
years ago, the Ancient Egyptians had acquired what sounded
like industrial-age drills packing a ton or more of punch
and capable of slicing through hard stones like hot knives
through butter?
Petrie could come up with
no explanation for this conundrum. Nor was he able to
explain the kind of instrument used to cut hieroglyphs into
a number of diorite bowls with Fourth Dynasty inscriptions
which he found at Giza: 'The hieroglyphs are incised with a
very free- cutting point; they are not scraped or ground
out, but are ploughed through the diorite, with rough edges
to the line. . .'14
This bothered the logical
Petrie because he knew that diorite was one of the hardest
stones on earth, far harder even than iron.ls Yet here it
was in Ancient Egypt being cut with incredible power and
precision by some as yet unidentified graving
tool:
As the lines are only
1/150 inch wide it is evident that the cutting point rmust
have been much harder than quartz; and tough enough not to
splinter when so fine an edge was being employed, probably
only 1/200
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inch wide. Parallel lines
are graved only 1/30 inch apart from centre to centre.
16
In other words, he was
envisaging an instrument with a needle-sharp point of
exceptional, unprecedented hardness capable of penetrating
and furrowing diorite with ease, and capable also of
withstanding the enormous pressures required throughout the
operation. What sort of instrument was that? By what means
would the pressure have been applied? How could sufficient
accuracy have been maintained to scour parallel lines at
intervals of just 1/30-inch?
At least it was possible
to conjure a mental picture of the circular drills with
jewelled teeth which Petrie supposed must have been used to
hollow out the King's Chamber sarcophagus. I found, however,
that it was not so easy to do the same for the unknown
instrument capable of incising hieroglyphs into diorite at
2500 BC, at any rate not without assuming the existence of a
far higher level of technology than Egyptologists were
prepared to consider.
Nor was it just a few
hieroglyphs or a few diorite bowls. During my travels in
Egypt I had examined many stone vessels - dating back in
some cases to pre-dynastic times - that had been
mysteriously hollowed out of a range of materials such as
diorite, basalt, quartz crystal and metamorphic
schist.17
For example, more than
30,000 such vessels had been found in the chambers beneath
the Third Dynasty Step Pyramid of Zoser at Saqqara.18 That
meant that they were at least as old as Zoser himself (i.e.
around 2650 BC I9). Theoretically, they could have been even
older than that, because identical vessels had been found in
pre-dynastic strata dated to 4000 BC and earlier,20 and
because the practice of handing down treasured heirlooms
from generation to generation had been deeply ingrained in
Egypt since time immemorial.
Whether they were made in
2500 BC or in 4000 BC or even earlier, the stone vessels
from the Step Pyramid were remarkable for their workmanship,
which once again seemed to have been accomplished by some as
yet unimagined (and, indeed, almost unimaginable)
tool.
Why unimaginable? Because
many of the vessels were tall vases with long, thin, elegant
necks and widely flared interiors, often incorporating fully
hollowed-out shoulders. No instrument yet invented was
capable of carving vases into shapes like these, because
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such an instrument would
have had to have been narrow enough to have passed through
the necks and strong enough (and of the right shape) to have
scoured out the shoulders and the rounded interiors. And how
could sufficient upward and outward pressure have been
generated and applied within the vases to achieve these
effects?
The tall vases were by no
means the only enigmatic vessels unearthed from the Pyramid
of Zoser, and from a number of other archaic sites. There
were monolithic urns with delicate ornamental handles left
attached to their exteriors by the carvers. There were
bowls, again with extremely narrow necks like the vases, and
with widely flared, pot-bellied interiors. There were also
open bowls, and almost microscopic vials, and occasional
strange wheel-shaped objects cut out of metamorphic schist
with inwardly curled edges planed down so fine that they
were almost translucent.21 In all cases what was really
perplexing was the precision with which the interiors and
exteriors of these vessels had been made to correspond -
curve matching curve - over absolutely smooth, polished
surfaces with no tool marks visible.
There was no technology
known to have been available to the Ancient Egyptians
capable of achieving such results. Nor, for that matter,
would any stone-carver today be able to match them, even if
he were working with the best tungsten-carbide tools. The
implica-tion, therefore, is that an unknown or secret
technology had been put to use in Ancient Egypt.
Ceremony of the
sarcophagus
Standing in the King's
Chamber, facing west - the direction of death amongst both
the Ancient Egyptians and the Maya - I rested my hands
lightly on the gnarled granite edge of the sarcophagus which
Egyptologists insist had been built to house the body of
Khufu. I gazed into its murky depths where the dim electric
lighting of the chamber seemed hardly to penetrate and saw
specks of dust swirling in a golden cloud.
It was just a trick of
light and shadow, of course, but the King's Chamber was full
of such illusions. I remembered that Napoleon Bonaparte had
paused to spend a night alone here during his conquest
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of Egypt in the late
eighteenth century. The next morning he had emerged pale and
shaken, having experienced something which had profoundly
disturbed him but about which he never afterwards
spoke.22
Had he tried to sleep in
the sarcophagus?
Acting on impulse, I
climbed into the granite coffer and lay down, face upwards,
my feet pointed towards the south and my head to the
north.
Napoleon was a little
guy, so he must have fitted comfortably. There was plenty of
room for me too. But had Khufu been here as well?
I relaxed and tried not
to worry about the possibility of one of the pyramid guards
coming in and finding me in this embarrassing and probably
illegal position. Hoping that I would remain undisturbed for
a few minutes, I folded my hands across my chest and gave
voice to a sustained low-pitched tone - something I had
tried out several times before at other points in the King's
Chamber. On those occasions, in the centre of the floor, I
had noticed that the walls and ceiling seemed to collect the
sound, to gather and to amplify it and project it back at me
so that I could sense the returning vibrations through my
feet and scalp and skin.
Now in the sarcophagus I
was aware of very much the same effect, although seemingly
amplified and concentrated many times over. It was like
being in the sound-box of some giant, resonant musical
instrument designed to emit for ever just one reverberating
note. The sound was intense and quite disturbing. I imagined
it rising out of the coffer and bouncing off the red granite
walls and ceiling of the King's Chamber, shooting up through
the northern and southern 'ventila-tion' shafts and
spreading across the Giza plateau like a sonic mushroom
cloud.
With this ambitious
vision in my mind, and with the sound of my low-pitched note
echoing in my ears and causing the sarcophagus to vibrate
around me, I closed my eyes. When I opened them a few
minutes later it was to behold a distressing sight: six
Japanese tourists of mixed ages and sexes had congregated
around the sarcophagus - two of them standing to the east,
two to the west and one each to the north and
south."
Well knock me
down with a feather said Zed Aliz, lookee hear, its wah
brother Graham, can you believe it and still here. Whereupon
released from his state of thrall, the good brother magiked,
an absence of sorts.
Page 355
"... Gathering as
much dignity as I could muster, I stood upright smiling and
dusting myself off. The Japanese stepped back and I climbed
out of the sarcophagus. "
The Alizzed drew the
counting scribes attention to the following quote. Whereupon
yon scribe aware of the routine of the route in.Set to work
In the first instance counting the number of letters in
each, of the do not darken my door words.Then quick az you
like calculated, from within that magikalalphabet every
witch word's essence of number
"...two of them
standing to the
east,
two to the
west
and one each to the
north
and
south."
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