Sahara is a young desert, and since the Giza area in particular was wet
and relatively fertile 11,000-15,000 years ago, is it not worth considering
another scenario altogether? Is it not possible that the Sphinx enclosure
was carved out during those distant green millennia when topsoil was still
anchored to the surface of the plateau by the roots of grasses and shrubs
and when what is now a desert of wind-blown sand more closely
resembled the rolling savannahs of modern Kenya and Tanzania?
Under such congenial climatic conditions, the creation of a semisubterranean monument like the Sphinx would not have outraged
common sense. The builders would have had no reason to anticipate the
slow desiccation and desertification of the plateau that would ultimately
follow.
Yet, is it feasible to imagine that the Sphinx could have been built when
Giza was still green—long, long ago?
As we shall see, such ideas are anathema to modern Egyptologists, who
are nevertheless obliged to admit (to quote Dr Mark Lehner, director of
the Giza Mapping Project) that ‘there is no direct way to date the Sphinx
itself, because the Sphinx is carved right out of natural rock.’21 In the
absence of more objective tests, Lehner went on to point out,
archaeologists had ‘to date things by context’. And the context of the
Sphinx, that is, the Giza necropolis—a well-known Fourth Dynasty site—
made it obvious that the Sphinx belonged to the Fourth Dynasty as well.22
Such reasoning was not regarded as axiomatic by Lehner’s
distinguished predecessors in the nineteenth century, who were at one
time convinced that the Sphinx long predated the Fourth Dynasty.
Whose Sphinx is it anyway?
In his Passing of Empires, published in 1900, the distinguished French
Egyptologist Gaston Maspero, who made a special study of the content of
the Sphinx Stela erected by Thutmosis IV, wrote:
The stela of the Sphinx bears, on line 13, the cartouche of Khafre in the middle of
a gap ... There, I believe, is an indication of [a renovation and clearance] of the
Sphinx carried out under this prince, and consequently the more or less certain
proof that the Sphinx was already covered with sand during the time of Khufu and
20 The Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 106-7.
21 Mark Lehner, 1992 AAAS Annual Meeting, Debate: How Old is the Sphinx?
22 Ibid.
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his predecessors ...23
The equally distinguished Auguste Mariette agreed—naturally enough
since he had been the finder of the Inventory Stela (which, as we have
seen, asserted matter-of-factly that the Sphinx was standing on the Giza
plateau long before the time of Khufu).24 Also generally concurring were
Brugsch ( Egypt under the Pharaohs, London, 1891), Petrie, Sayce and
many other eminent scholars of the period.25 Travel writers such as John
Ward affirmed that ‘the Great Sphinx must be numberless years older
even than the Pyramids’. And as late as 1904 Wallis Budge, the respected
keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, had no hesitation in
making this unequivocal assertion:
The oldest and finest human-headed lion statue is the famous ‘Sphinx’ at Giza.
This marvellous object was in existence in the days of Khafre, the builder of the
Second Pyramid, and was, most probably, very old even at that early period ... The
Sphinx was thought to be connected in some way with foreigners or with a foreign
religion which dated from predynastic times.26
Between the beginning and the end of the twentieth century, however,
Egyptologists’ views about the antiquity of the Sphinx changed
dramatically. Today there is not a single orthodox Egyptologist who
would even discuss, let alone consider seriously, the wild and
irresponsible suggestion, once a commonplace, that the Sphinx might
have been built thousands of years before Khafre’s reign.
According to Dr Zahi Hawass, for example, director of Giza and Saqqara
for the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, many such theories have been
put forward but have ‘gone with the wind’ because ‘we Egyptologists
have solid evidence to state that the Sphinx is dated to the time of
Khafre.’27
Likewise, Carol Redmont, an archaeologist at the University of
California’s Berkeley campus, was incredulous when it was suggested to
her that the Sphinx might be thousands of years older than Khafre:
‘There’s just no way that could be true. The people of that region would
not have had the technology, the governing institutions or even the will
to build such a structure thousands of years before Khafre’s reign.’28
When I first started to research this issue, I had assumed, as Hawass
appeared to claim, that some incontrovertible new evidence must have
been found which had settled the identity of the monument’s builder.
This was not the case. Indeed there are only three ‘contextual’ reasons
why the construction of the anonymous, uninscribed and enigmatic
23 Gaston Maspero, The Passing of Empires, New York, 1900.
24 See Chapter Thirty-five.
25 For a general summary of these views see John Ward, Pyramids and Progress, London,
1900, pp. 38-42.
26 The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, pp. 471-2 and volume II, p. 361.
27 Interview in Mystery of the Sphinx, NBC-TV, 1993.
28 Cited in Serpent In The Sky, p. 230.
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Sphinx is now so confidently attributed to Khafre:
1 Because of the cartouche of Khafre on line 13 of the Sphinx Stela
erected by Thutmosis IV: Maspero gave a perfectly reasonable
explanation for the presence of this cartouche: Thutmosis had been a
restorer of the Sphinx and had paid due tribute to an earlier
restoration of the monument—one undertaken during the Fourth
Dynasty by Khafre. This explanation, which bears the obvious
implication that the Sphinx must already have been old in Khafre’s
time, is rejected by modern Egyptologists. With their usual telepathic
like-mindedness they now agree that Thutmosis put the cartouche on
to the stela to recognize that Khafra had been the original builder (and
not a mere restorer).
Since there had only ever been this single cartouche—and since the
texts on either side of it were missing when the stela was excavated, is
it not a little premature to come to such hard-and-fast conclusions?
What sort of ‘science’ is it that allows the mere presence of the
cartouche of a Fourth Dynasty pharaoh (on a stele erected by an
Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh) to determine the entire identification of
an otherwise anonymous monument? Besides, even that cartouche has
now flaked off and cannot be examined ...
2 Because the Valley Temple next door is also attributed to Khafre:
That attribution (based on statues which may well have been intrusive)
is shaky to say the least. It has nevertheless received the wholehearted
endorsement of the Egyptologists, who in the process decided to
attribute the Sphinx to Khafre too (since the Sphinx and the Valley
Temple are so obviously connected).
3 Because the face of the Sphinx is thought to resemble the intact
statue of Khafre found in the pit in the Valley Temple: This, of
course, is a matter of opinion. I have never seen the slightest
resemblance between the two faces. Nor for that matter had forensic
artists from the New York Police Department who had recently been
brought in to do an Identikit comparison between the Sphinx and the
statue29 (as we shall see in Part VII).
All in all, therefore, as I stood overlooking the Sphinx in the late
afternoon of 16 March 1993, I considered that the jury was still very
much out on the correct attribution of this monument—either to Khafre
on the one hand or to the architects of an as yet unidentified high
civilization of prehistoric antiquity on the other.30 No matter what the
29 Ibid., pp. 230-2; Mystery of the Sphinx, NBC-TV.
30 At least one orthodox Egyptologist, Selim Hassan, has admitted that the jury is still
out on this issue. After twenty years of excavations at Giza he wrote, ‘Except for the
mutilated line on the Granite Stela of Thutmosis IV, which proves nothing, there is not
one single ancient inscription which connects the Sphinx with Khafre. So, sound as it
may appear, we must treat this evidence as circumstantial until such a time as a lucky
turn of the spade will reveal to the world definite reference to the erection of this
statue.’ Cited in Conde Nast Traveller, February 1993, pp. 168-9.
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current flavour of the month (or century) happened to be with the
Egyptologists, the fact was that both scenarios were plausible. What was
needed, therefore, was some completely hard and unambiguous evidence
which would settle the matter one way or the other.
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Part VII
Lord of Eternity
Egypt 2
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Chapter 40
Are There Any Secrets Left in Egypt?
During the early evening of 26 November 1922 the British archaeologist
Howard Carter, together with his sponsor Lord Carnarvon, entered the
tomb of a youthful pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty who had ruled
Egypt from 1352-43 BC. The name of that pharaoh, which has since
resounded around the world, was Tutankhamun.
Two nights later, on 28 November, the tomb’s ‘Treasury’ was breached.
It was filled with a huge golden shrine and gave access to another
chamber beyond. Rather unusually, this chamber, although heaped with a
dazzling array of precious and beautiful artefacts, had no door: its
entrance was watched over by an extraordinarily lifelike effigy of the
jackal-headed mortuary god Anubis. With ears erect, the god crouched
doglike, forepaws stretched out, on the lid of a gilded wooden casket
perhaps four feet long, three feet high and two feet wide.
The Egyptian Museum, Cairo, December 1993
Still perched astride his casket, but now locked away in a dusty glass
display case, Anubis held my attention for a long, quiet moment. His
effigy had been carved out of stuccoed wood, entirely covered with black
resin, then painstakingly inlaid with gold, alabaster, calcite, obsidian and
silver—materials used to particular effect in the eyes, which glittered
watchfully with an unsettling sense of fierce and focused intelligence. At
the same time his finely etched ribs and lithe musculature gave off an
aura of understated strength, energy and grace.
Captured by the force field of this occult and powerful presence, I was
vividly reminded of the universal myths of precession I had been studying
during the past year. Canine figures moved back and forth among these
myths in a manner which at times had seemed almost plotted in the
literary sense. I had begun to wonder whether the symbolism of dogs,
wolves, jackals, and so on, might have been deliberately employed by the
long-dead myth-makers to guide initiates through a maze of clues to
secret reservoirs of lost scientific knowledge.
Among these reservoirs, I suspected, was the myth of Osiris. Much
more than a myth, it had been dramatized and performed each year in
Ancient Egypt in the form of a mystery play—a ‘plotted’ literary artefact,
passed down as a treasured tradition since prehistoric times.1 This
tradition, as we saw in Part V, contained values for the rate of
1 See, for example, Rosalie David, A Guide to Religious Ritual at Abydos, Aris and Phillips,
Warminster, 1981, in particular p. 121.
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precessional motion that were so accurate and so consistent it was
extremely difficult to attribute them to chance. Nor did it seem likely to
be an accident that the jackal god had been assigned a role centre-stage
in the drama, serving as the spirit guide of Osiris on his journey through
the underworld.2 It was tempting, too, to wonder whether there was any
significance in the fact that in ancient times Anubis had been referred to
by Egyptian priests as the ‘guardian of the secret and sacred writings’.3)
Under the grooved edge of the gilded casket on which his effigy now
crouched was found an inscription: ‘initiated into the secrets’.4
Alternative translations of the same hieroglyphic text rendered it
variously as ‘he who is upon the secrets’, and as ‘guardian of the
But were there any secrets left in Egypt?
After more than a century of intensive archaeological investigations,
could the sands of this antique land yield any further surprises?
Bauval’s Stars and West’s Stones
In 1993 there was an astonishing new discovery which suggested that
there was much still to learn about Ancient Egypt. The discoverer,
moreover, was not some astigmatic archaeologist sieving his way through
the dust of ages but an outsider to the field: Robert Bauval, a Belgian
construction engineer with a flair for astronomy who observed a
correlation in the sky that the experts had missed in their fixation with
the ground at their feet.
What Bauval saw was this: as the three belt stars of the Orion
constellation crossed the merdian at Giza they lay in a not quite straight
line high in the southern heavens. The lower two stars, Al Nitak and Al
Nilam, formed a perfect diagonal but the third star, Mintaka, appeared to
be offset to the observer’s left, that is, towards the east.
2 The Gods of the Egyptians, volume II, pp. 262-6.
3 Lucy Lamy, Egyptian Mysteries, Thames & Hudson, London, 1986, p. 93.
4 Jean-Pierre Corteggiani, The Egypt of the Pharaohs at the Cairo Museum, Scala
Publications, London, 1987, p. 118.
5 Ibid.; see also R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, Sacred Science: The King of Pharaonic
Theocracy, Inner Traditions International, Rochester, 1988, pp. 182-3.
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The three pyramids of Giza plotted against the three belt stars of the
Orion constellation.
Curiousl
y enough (as we saw in Chapter Thirty-six), this was exactly the
site-plan of the three enigmatic pyramids of the Giza plateau. Bauval
realized that an aerial view of the Giza necropolis would show the Great
Pyramid of Khufu occupying the position of Al Nitak, and the Second
Pyramid of Khafre occupying the position of Al Nilam, while the Third
Pyramid of Menkaure was offset to the east of the diagonal formed by the
other two—thus completing what seemed at first to be a vast diagram of
the stars.
Was this indeed what the Giza pyramids represented? I knew that
Bauval’s later work, which had been wholeheartedly endorsed by
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mathematicians and astronomers, had borne out his inspired hunch. His
evidence (reviewed fully in Chapter Forty-nine) showed that the three
pyramids were an unbelievably precise terrestrial map of the three stars
of Orion’s belt, accurately reflecting the angles between each of them and
even (by means of their respective sizes) providing some indication of
their individual magnitudes.6 Moreover, this map extended outwards to
the north and south to encompass several other structures on the Giza
plateau—once again with faultless precision.7 However, the real surprise
revealed by Bauval’s astronomical calculations was this: despite the fact
that some aspects of the Great Pyramid did relate astronomically to the
Pyramid Age, the Giza monuments as a whole were so arranged as to
provide a picture of the skies (which alter their appearance down the ages
as a result of precession of the equinoxes) not as they had looked in the
Fourth Dynasty around 2500 BC, but as they had looked—and only as they
had looked—around the year 10,450 BC.8
I had come to Egypt to go over the Giza site with Robert Bauval and to
question him about his star-correlation theory. In addition I wanted to
canvass his views on what sort of human society, if any, could have had
the technological know-how, such a very long while ago, to measure
accurately the altitudes of the stars and to devise a plan as mathematical
and ambitious as that of the Giza necropolis.
I had also come to meet another researcher who had challenged the
orthodox chronology of Ancient Egypt with a well-founded claim to have
found hard evidence of a high civilization in the Nile Valley in 10,000 BC