Fingerprints of the Gods

  of the neighbouring Second Pyramid, supposedly built by the Fourth

  16 Piazzi Smyth, The Great Pyramid: Its Secrets and Mysteries Revealed, Bell Publishing

  Company, New York, 1990, p. 80.

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  Dynasty Pharaoh Khafre (Chephren). This stunning monument, second

  only in size and majesty to the Great Pyramid itself (being just a few feet

  shorter and 48 feet narrower at the base) appeared lit up, as though

  energized from within, by a pale and unearthly fire. Behind it in the

  distance, slightly offset among the dark desert shadows, was the smaller

  Pyramid of Menkaure (Mycerinus), measuring 356 feet along each side

  and some 215 feet in height.17

  For a moment, against the glittering backdrop of the inky sky, I

  experienced the illusion of being in motion, of standing at the stern of

  some great ship of the heavens and looking back at two other vessels

  which seemed to follow in my wake, strung out in battle order behind me.

  So where was this convoy going, this squadron of pyramids? And were

  the prodigious structures all the work of megalomaniac pharaohs, as the

  Egyptologists believed? Or had they been designed by mysterious hands

  to voyage eternally through time and space towards some as yet

  unidentified objective?

  From this altitude, though the southern sky was partially occluded by

  the vast bulk of the Pyramid of Khafre, I could see all the western sky as it

  arched down from the celestial north pole towards the distant rim of the

  revolving planet. Polaris, the Pole Star, was far to my right, in the

  constellation of the Little Bear. Low on the horizon, about ten degrees

  north of west, Regulus, the paw-star of the imperial constellation of Leo,

  was about to set.

  Under Egyptian skies

  Just above the 150th course, Ali hissed at us to keep our heads down. A

  police car had come into view around the north-western corner of the

  Great Pyramid and was now proceeding along the western flank of the

  monument with its blue light slowly flashing. We stayed motionless in the

  shadows until the car had passed. Then we began to climb again, with a

  renewed sense of urgency, heading as fast as we could towards the

  summit, which we now imagined we could see jutting out above the misty

  predawn haze.

  For what seemed like five minutes we climbed without stopping. When I

  looked up, however, the top of the Pyramid still seemed as far away as

  ever. We climbed again, panting and sweating, and once again the

  summit drew back before us like some legendary Welsh peak. Then, just

  when we’d resigned ourselves to an endless succession of such

  disappointments, we found ourselves at the top, under a breathtaking

  canopy of stars, more than 450 feet above the surrounding plateau on

  the most extraordinary viewing platform in the world. To our north and

  east, sprawled out across the wide, sloping valley of the River Nile, lay the

  17 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 125.

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  city of Cairo, a jumble of skyscrapers and flat traditional roofs separated

  by the dark defiles of narrow streets and interspersed with the needlepoint minarets of a thousand and one mosques. A film of reflected streetlighting shimmered over the whole scene, closing the eyes of modern

  Cairenes to the wonder of the stars but at the same time creating the

  hallucination of a fairyland illuminated in greens and reds and blues and

  sulphurous yellows.

  I felt privileged to witness this strange, electronic mirage from such an

  incredible vantage point, perched on the summit platform of the last

  surviving wonder of the ancient world, hovering in the sky over Cairo like

  Aladdin on his magic carpet.

  Not that the 203rd course of the Great Pyramid of Egypt could be

  described as a carpet! Measuring just under 30 feet on each side (as

  against the monument’s side length of around 755 feet at the base) it

  consisted of several hundred waist-high limestone blocks, each of which

  weighed about five tons. The course was not completely level: a few

  blocks were missing or broken, and rising towards the southern end

  there were the substantial remains of about half an additional step of

  masonry. Moreover, at the very centre of the platform, someone had

  arranged for a triangular wooden scaffold to be erected, through the

  middle of which rose a thick pole, just over 31 feet long, which marked

  the monument’s original true height of 481.3949 feet.18 Beneath this a

  scrawl of graffiti had been carved into the limestone by generations of

  tourists.19

  The complete ascent of the Pyramid had taken us about half an hour

  and it was now just after 5 a.m., the time of morning worship. Almost in

  unison, the voices of a thousand and one muezzins rang out from the

  balconies of the minarets of Cairo, calling the faithful to prayer and

  reaffirming the greatness, the indivisibility, the mercy and the

  compassion of God. Behind me, to the south-west, the top 22 courses of

  Khafre’s Pyramid, still clad with their original facing stones, seemed to

  float like an iceberg on the ocean of moonlight.

  Knowing that we could not stay long in this bewitching place, I sat

  down and gazed around at the heavens. Over to the west, across limitless

  desert sands, Regulus had now set beneath the horizon, and the rest of

  the lion’s body was poised to follow. The constellations of Virgo and

  Libra were also dropping lower in the sky and, much farther to the north,

  I could see the Great and Little Bears slowly pacing out their eternal cycle

  around the celestial pole.

  I looked south-east across the Nile Valley and there was the crescent

  moon still spreading its spectral radiance from the bank of the Milky Way.

  18 Ibid., p. 87.

  19 ‘One is irritated by the number of imbeciles’ names written everywhere,’ Gustave

  Flaubert commented in his Letters From Egypt. ‘On the top of the Great Pyramid there is

  a certain Buffard, 79 rue St Martin, wallpaper manufacturer, in black letters.’

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  Following the course of the celestial river, I looked due south: there,

  crossing the meridian, was the resplendent constellation of Scorpius

  dominated by the first-magnitude star Antares—a red supergiant 300

  times the diameter of the sun. North-east, above Cairo, sailed Cygnus the

  swan, his tail feathers marked by Deneb, a blue-white supergiant visible

  to us across more than 1800 light years of interstellar space. Last but not

  least, in the northern sky, the dragon Draco coiled sinuously among the

  circumpolar stars. Indeed, 4500 years ago, when the Great Pyramid was

  supposedly being built for the Fourth Dynasty Pharaoh Khufu (Cheops),

  one of the stars of Draco had stood close to the celestial north pole and

  had served as the Pole Star. This had been alpha Draconis, also known as

  Thuban. With the passing of the millennia, however, it had gradually been

  displaced from its position by the remorseless celestial mill of the earth’s

  axial precession so that t
he Pole Star today is Polaris in the Little Bear.20

  I lay back, cushioned my head in my hands and gazed directly up

  towards the zenith of heaven. Through the smooth cold stones I rested

  on, I thought I could sense beneath me, like a living force, the

  stupendous gravity and mass of the pyramid.

  Thinking like giants

  Covering a full 13.1 acres at the base, it weighed about six million tons—

  more than all the buildings in the Square Mile of the City of London

  added together,21 and consisted, as we have seen, of roughly 2.3 million

  individual blocks of limestone and granite. To these had once been added

  a 22-acre, mirror-like cladding consisting of an estimated 115,000 highly

  polished casing stones, each weighing 10 tons, which had originally

  covered all four of its faces.22

  After being shaken loose by a massive earthquake in AD 1301, the

  majority of the facing blocks had subsequently been removed for the

  construction of Cairo.23 Here and there around the base, however, I knew

  that enough had remained in position to permit the great nineteenth

  century archaeologist, W.M. Flinders Petrie, to carry out a detailed study

  of them. He had been stunned to encounter tolerances of less than onehundredth of an inch and cemented joints so precise and so carefully

  aligned that it was impossible to slip even the fine blade of a pocket knife

  between them. ‘Merely to place such stones in exact contact would be

  careful work’, he admitted, ‘but to do so with cement in the joint seems

  almost impossible; it is to be compared to the finest opticians’ work on a

  20 Skyglobe 3.6.

  21 How the Pyramids Were Built, p. 4-5.

  22 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, pp. 232, 244.

  23 Ibid., p. 17.

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  scale of acres.’24

  Of course, the jointing of the casing stones was by no means the only

  ‘almost impossible’ feature of the Great Pyramid. The alignments to true

  north, south, east and west were ‘almost impossible’, so too were the

  near-perfect ninety-degree corners, and the incredible symmetry of the

  four enormous sides. And so were the engineering logistics of raising

  millions of huge stones hundreds of feet in the air ...

  Whoever they had been, therefore, the architects, engineers and

  stonemasons who had designed and successfully built this stupendous

  monument must indeed have ‘thought like men 100 feet tall’, as JeanFrançois Champollion, the founder of modern Egyptology, had once

  observed. He had seen clearly what generations of his successors were to

  close their eyes to: that the pyramid builders could only have been men

  of giant intellectual stature. Beside the Egyptians of old, he had added,

  ‘we in Europe are but Lilliputians.’25

  24 Cited in Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 90.

  25 Ibid., p. 40. Champollion of course, deciphered the Rosetta Stone.

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  Chapter 35

  Tombs and Tombs Only?

  Climbing down the Great Pyramid was more nerve wracking than climbing

  up. We were no longer struggling against the force of gravity, so the

  physical effort was less. But the possibilities of a fatal fall seemed greatly

  magnified now that our attention was directed exclusively towards the

  ground rather than the heavens. We picked our way with exaggerated

  care towards the base of the enormous mountain of stone, sliding and

  slithering among the treacherous masonry blocks, feeling as though we

  had been reduced to ants.

  By the time we had completed the descent the night was over and the

  first wash of pale sunlight was filtering into the sky. We paid the 50

  Egyptian pounds promised to the guard of the pyramid’s western face

  and then, with a tremendous sense of release and exultation, we walked

  jauntily away from the monument in the direction of the Pyramid of

  Khafre, a few hundred metres to the south-west.

  Khufu, Khafre, Menkaure ... Cheops, Chephren, Mycerinus. Whether

  they were referred to by their Egyptian or their Greek names, the fact

  remained that these three pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty (2575-2467 BC)

  were universally acclaimed as the builders of the Giza pyramids. This had

  been the case at least since Ancient Egyptian tour guides had told the

  Greek historian Herodotus that the Great Pyramid had been built by

  Khufu. Herodotus had incorporated this information into the oldest

  surviving written description of the monuments, which continued:

  Cheops, they said, reigned for fifty years, and on his death the kingship was taken

  over by his brother Chephren. He also made a pyramid ... it is forty feet lower than

  his brother’s pyramid, but otherwise of the same greatness ... Chephren reigned

  for fifty-six years ... then there succeeded Mycerinus, the son of Cheops ... This

  man left a pyramid much smaller than his father’s.1

  1 Herodotus, The History (translated by David Grene), University of Chicago Press, 1987,

  pp. 187-9.

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  Site plan of the Giza necropolis

  Herodotus saw the monuments in the fifth century BC, more than 2000

  years after they had been built. Nevertheless it was largely on the

  foundation of his testimony that the entire subsequent judgement of

  history was based. All other commentators, up to the present, continued

  uncritically to follow in the Greek historian’s footsteps. And down the

  ages—although it had originally been little more than hearsay—the

  attribution of the Great Pyramid to Khufu, the Second Pyramid to Khafre

  and the Third Pyramid to Menkaure had assumed the stature of

  unassailable fact.

  Trivializing the mystery

  Having parted company with Ali, Santha and I continued our walk into the

  desert. Skirting the immense south-western corner of the Second

  Pyramid, our eyes were drawn towards its summit. There we noted again

  the intact facing stones that still covered its top 22 courses. We also

  noticed that the first few courses above its base, each of which had a

  ‘footprint’ of about a dozen acres, were composed of truly massive

  blocks of limestone, almost too high to clamber over, which were about

  20 feet long and 6 feet thick. These extraordinary monoliths, as I was

  later to discover, weighed 200 tons apiece and belonged to a distinct

  style of masonry to be found at several different and widely scattered

  locations within the Giza necropolis.

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  On its north and west sides the Second Pyramid sat on a level platform

  cut down out of the surrounding bedrock and was thus enclosed within a

  wide trench more than 15 feet deep in places. Walking due south, parallel

  to the monument’s scarred western flank, we picked our way along the

  edge of this trench towards the much smaller Third Pyramid, which lay

  some 400 metres ahead of us in the desert.

  Khufu ... Khafre ... Menkaure ... According to all orthodox Egyptologists

  the pyramids had been built as tombs—and only as tombs—for these


  three pharaohs. Yet there were some obvious difficulties with such

  assertions. For example, the spacious burial chamber of the Khafre

  Pyramid was empty when it was opened in 1818 by the European explorer

  Giovanni Belzoni. Indeed, more than empty, the chamber was starkly,

  austerely bare. The polished granite sarcophagus which lay embedded in

  its floor had also been found empty, with its lid broken into two pieces

  nearby.2 How was this to be explained?

  To Egyptologists the answer seemed obvious. At some early date,

  probably not many hundreds of years after Khafre’s death, tomb robbers

  must have penetrated the chamber and cleared all its contents including

  the mummified body of the pharaoh.

  Much the same thing seemed to have happened at the smaller Third

  Pyramid, towards which Santha and I were now walking—that attributed

  to Menkaure. Here the first European to break in had been a British

  colonel, Howard Vyse, who had entered the burial chamber in 1837. He

  found an empty basalt sarcophagus, an anthropoid coffin lid made of

  wood, and some bones. The natural assumption was that these were the

  remains of Menkaure. Modern science had subsequently proved, however,

  that the bones and coffin lid dated from the early Christian era, that is,

  from 2500 years after the Pyramid Age, and thus represented the

  ‘intrusive burial’ of a much later individual (quite a common practice

  throughout Ancient Egyptian history). As to the basalt sarcophagus—well,

  it could have belonged to Menkaure. Unfortunately, however, nobody had

  the opportunity to examine it because it had been lost at sea when the

  ship on which Vyse sent it to England had sunk off the coast of Spain.3

  Since it was a matter of record that the sarcophagus had been found

  empty by Vyse, it was once again assumed that the body of the pharaoh

  must have been removed by tomb robbers.

  A similar assumption had been made about the body of Khufu, which

  was also missing. Here the scholarly consensus, expressed as well as

  anyone by George Hart of the British Museum, was that ‘no later than 500

  years after Khufu’s funeral’ robbers had forced their way into the Great

  Pyramid ‘to steal the burial treasure’.4 The implication is that this

  incursion must have occurred by or before 2000 BC—since Khufu is