Pyramid Quest (31 page)

Throughout this book we have encountered repeated evidence of the cosmic nature of the Great Pyramid and the Giza monuments—from the zo diacal star clock to the replication of Orion’s Belt, from the perfect northerly orientation to the Descending Passage’s alignments with the celestial north pole. In addition, Stecchini’s measurements show that the Great Pyramid maps the Northern Hemisphere in exquisite geodesic detail. The ancient Egyptians went to a great deal of trouble to chart their world, both heaven and earth, and create a cosmic sacred space in the Great Pyramid.

Surely they carried that motivation over to the internal passages. This wasn’t a case of the builder changing his mind or losing courage at various points in the process, as various Egyptologists have proposed. The internal architecture of the Great Pyramid is no mistake; it is as much the product of intention and plan as the external shape. The outside gives us the macrocosm; the inside, the microcosm. The one describes the universe; the other the human soul.

Understanding the Great Pyramid in this way also answers a major hanging question: Why of all the many pyramids that the ancient Egyptians built, does only the Great Pyramid contain such an intricate system of passages and chambers? If the Great Pyramid, like all other pyramids, served solely as a tomb to safeguard the body of the deceased pharaoh and to conduct his soul into the afterlife, then every pyramid could be expected to follow more or less the same design, both externally and internally. The Great Pyramid’s internal architecture is unique, however. Was Khufu so special and distinct that his passage into the world beyond required special and distinct treatment? No; rather, something else was happening in the Great Pyramid. Once this structure was built and its purpose served, no similar structure was needed again. The Great Pyramid served a purpose apart from simply entombing a pharaoh. It was, in some manner, a temple, a sacred space in Eliade’s terms, one that created an experience of ultimate, timeless reality.

In the late nineteenth century, W. Marsham Adams put out the idea that the Great Pyramid symbolized a body of rituals we know from the
Book of the Dead:

The eminent Egyptologist Gaston Maspero (1846-1916) agreed with Adams. “The Pyramids and the
Book of the Dead
reproduce the same original, the one in words, the other in stone,” he wrote.
¹⁶

Actually, there is no one
Book of the Dead.
The name is given to a group of New Kingdom mortuary spells written on sheets of papyrus covered with magical texts and elaborate illustrations called vignettes. There are approximately 200 spells in total, although no single surviving papyrus contains every one of them. Instead, various spells were chosen for a given individual, written and drawn on a papyrus, and buried with him or her. Wealthy people typically had highly customized collections, often with their own likeness included among the vignettes. People less well off could buy template papyri and write the names of the deceased in the blanks.

One of the best preserved versions of the
Book of the Dead
is the “Papyrus of Ani,” which dates to 1240 B.C. and both shows and tells of the passage of the scribe Ani and his wife into and through the land of the dead. Ultimately they come to the Hall of Ma’at, where their hearts are weighed against a feather and they are found worthy to enter the realm of the gods and become one with the stars. This is not an easy path, however. Ani must triumph in one ordeal after another, each requiring special knowledge and particular spells. By using the spells in the papyrus, Ani overcomes each obstacle and provides himself with food, drink, and everything else necessary to dwell in the land of eternity. By the end, he has gained such power and magic that he himself is a deity and can live among the gods.

While the “Papyrus of Ani” dates to the New Kingdom and is approximately 1,300 or 1,400 years younger than the Great Pyramid, it draws from a tradition that reaches well back into ancient Egypt. The
Book of the Dead
comes from the same original source as the so-called Coffin Texts of the Middle Kingdom and the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom. Almost certainly, the tradition reaches back even farther, into the Predynastic Period in the fourth millennium B.C., to a time when most learning was oral and ritual texts were memorized rather than written down. We know this is true of the Greek epic poems, which existed in oral form for centuries before they were recorded, and of the
Epic of Gilgamesh,
which scholars suspect dates to least a millennium earlier than the oldest known written copy. There is no reason to suspect that the
Book of the Dead
is any different. Almost certainly these spells and the journey they describe are much older than their written versions.

The Egyptians had another name for the
Book of the Dead
—
prt m hrw,
which means “coming forth by day.” The name refers to the freedom the dead enjoyed once they had passed through their various ordeals, mastered the knowledge they needed, and spoken the special spells. It could well be that the
Book of the Dead
isn’t just about the dead, and that those who came forth by day could be numbered among the living as well as the deceased. Individuals who passed through a reenactment of the journey of the dead had a look into what happened on the other side of death. Seeing where they were headed, they possessed the freedom of knowing the way ahead. The living as well as the dead could come forth by day and enter the light of understanding. The
Book of the Dead
charted the path the individual soul could travel toward the freedom of knowing the true nature of both life and death.

Imagine arriving at the Giza Plateau as a pilgrim prepared to see a vision or to receive sacred wisdom rooted in the
Book of the Dead.
Imagine preparing with meditation and offerings, fasting and prayers over many days. Everywhere you turn, the cosmos is remade in stone and light. You make your way through the various stations and pyramids of the Giza Plateau, working through the labyrinthine passages and chambers with all their many orientations, angles, and dimensions, each with a unique meaning and significance. Imagine coming to the end of this long spiritual and metaphysical journey in the King’s Chamber, where, like Ani in the Hall of Ma’at, your heart will be weighed against a feather. Prepared by meditation, fasting, physical exhaustion, and ritual days and nights filled with chanting, music, incense, and drumming, isolated from the rest of the world by those millions of tons of limestone and granite, you are left alone in the absolute darkness of the chamber with only the enigmatic granite coffer as company and no immediate way out. Imagine yourself there, immured within that mass of spiritually shaped rock, your defenses stripped and your fears dispelled. Know that the visions will come.

A FRESH LOOK AT AN ANCIENT WONDER

THE BIGGEST, AND MOST COMMON, MISTAKE MADE IN attempting to unravel the mystery of the Great Pyramid is to assume that it is but one structure built at one time for one purpose. This error has been made again and again, from Smyth’s biblical quest to conventional Egyptology’s tomb-for-Khufu theory to Farrell’s peculiar vision of a prehistoric death star. The reality is vastly more complex and, ultimately, much more interesting.

Not that our understanding is complete. There is much about the Great Pyramid we do not understand and may, in fact, never fully comprehend. Still, when I study the evidence at hand, a likely picture emerges, one that is very different from the standard explanation.

This picture begins with time. What we know as the Great Pyramid was built not all at once, in a single historical episode, but in stages across a long span of prehistory and history. What we see today isn’t the product of one architectural genius or a single highly accomplished civilization but rather the end result of several rounds of construction, each successive phase elaborating on the ones before it. Indeed, the Egyptians rarely built something once and for all. The temples at Karnak and Luxor were rebuilt and refurbished repeatedly, and a dynastic pharaoh took it upon himself to recarve the head of the Great Sphinx and excavate its rump. In the case of the Great Pyramid, this process began well before the time of the Fourth Dynasty and Khufu.

I believe the evidence shows that the mound that underlies the Great Pyramid and was incorporated into it as part of the structure’s foundation began serving as a sacred site no later than 5000 B.C. and possibly even as early as 7000 B.C. Use of the mound for ritual purposes, such as sacred astronomy, almost certainly dates to the time when the first structures were erected on the Giza Plateau—namely, the core body of the Great Sphinx and the Sphinx Temple. It is also likely that these same builders constructed the Valley Temple that lies to the south of the Sphinx Temple, the causeway leading to the Khafre Pyramid, a platform or base later incorporated into the Khafre Pyramid, and the core of what is now known as the Tomb of Queen Khentkawes (a queen of the late Fourth Dynasty whose tomb appears to have be an earlier structure that was refurbished and reused).

The next round of construction occurred in the middle of the fourth millennium B.C., in the Predynastic Period, centuries before Menes brought the Two Lands together. In this period, the Descending Passage was cut into the sacred mound following the angle of light falling from Alpha Draconis, which rested near the celestial North Pole at the time. These ancient builders of the second round also excavated the Subterranean Chamber at the end of the Descending Passage.

It is also possible, perhaps even likely, that these same builders laid the bottommost courses of the Great Pyramid. As the nineteenth-century British astronomer Richard Proctor demonstrated, the angles of the Descending and Ascending passages follow the same angle that would have been set by Alpha Draconis around 3500 B.C. Since neither passage rises above the level of the floor of the Queen’s Chamber, it is possible that this lowest reach of the structure was built at about the same time that the Descending Passage was bored into the bedrock of the underlying mound. The resulting flat platform, with its nearly perfect orientation to the cardinal directions, would have made an excellent astronomical observatory, one that raised the ritual purpose of the site to a new level. Since the days before Nabta Playa and Giza’s natural sacred mound, the people of ancient Egypt had observed the skies and committed their observations to memory transmitted across generations. Now they had an even more sophisticated tool for carrying out this work.

Then, in the area of a millennium later, Old Kingdom Egyptians, quite possibly led by Khufu, built up from the base of the Great Pyramid. They added the Queen’s Chamber and constructed the magnificent Grand Gallery to create an astonishingly elaborate astronomical observatory. The best evidence for this date comes from the star shafts emanating from the Queen’s Chamber. As Robert Bauval has determined, the skies of the middle of the third millennium B.C. would have positioned Sirius—brightest star in the heavens and sacred to Isis—in line with the southern shaft, and four of the stars in the head or body of Ursa Minor (or Little Dipper) with the northern shaft.

The next round of construction finished the pyramid above the Grand Gallery. The King’s Chamber, the Relieving Chambers, and the upper courses of stone were all added. Most probably this occurred during the Fourth Dynasty, perhaps later in the reign of Khufu, as is evidenced by the quarry marks in the Relieving Chambers and the alignments of the star shafts beginning in the King’s Chamber.

At some point following this phase of building, the granite plugs were lowered into the base of the Grand Gallery, and access to the upper chambers was cut off. Why this was done is unclear. The standard explanation is that the barriers were meant to protect Khufu’s mummy from grave robbers. I doubt this explanation, though, simply because there is little reason to believe that the Great Pyramid was intended primarily—or even secondarily—as a burial site. Some writers have suggested that the plugs made the upper reaches of the Great Pyramid a time capsule or repository of sacred information. That may be the case, although we currently have no way of knowing.

One other important event occurred at this time, too, I believe. The final outer casing of white Tura limestone was fitted to the Great Pyramid to give it an exterior polish that indicated the structure’s completion.