Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology's Greatest Mystery (17 page)

In early 2008, the Giza pyramids and their layout suddenly flashed up mid-screen on our radar. Once we realized that the henges at Thornborough really were created as a representation of Orion’s Belt, the work of Bauval and Gilbert gained a new meaning for us.

It was not a complete surprise as we had established an apparently inexplicable link between megalithic Britain and ancient Egypt several years earlier. In our first book together,
Civilization One
, we had found that the two major units of length, the royal cubit and the
remen
, seemed to come from the pendulum-derived Megalithic Yard.

We had discovered that a circle with a circumference of one Megalithic Yard had a diameter of one royal cubit. And the
remen
was the hypotenuse of a square around that circle (
see
figure 14).

The circle has a circumference of 1 Meg Yard. The hypotenuse
of a square around that circle is 1 Egyptian
remen
.

Figure 14.
The relationship between the Megalithic Yard and the Egyptian
remen

It is for this reason that the Great Pyramid of Khufu appears to have been built using the ratio we know as pi. The concept is a little difficult to explain but let us suggest that the Egyptian priests made a trundle wheel that had a circumference of one Megalithic Yard. Let us now assume that they used this to measure out 279 rotations along the ground for each side of the pyramid. Now instead of using the wheel for the sides of the pyramid, a measurement equivalent to the diameter of the wheel was used 279 times for the pyramid’s height. This being the case, the finished pyramid would be bound to exhibit pi, whether the builders understood it or not.

Taking Bauval’s theory together with our earlier discoveries of megalithic measures on the Giza Plateau, it seemed as though a careful re-read of
The Orion Mystery
was necessary. We were not disappointed by what we found.

One aspect we had not fully appreciated until we re-read the book was how important the river Nile was to the sky picture the Egyptians were apparently trying to create in the desert. When seen from the Earth amongst the backdrop of stars Orion’s Belt lies adjacent to the Milky Way. The Milky Way is the galaxy to which our Sun belongs and the milky white smear across the night sky is created because we are looking sideways into the centre of the galaxy with its millions of stars. Only someone who has seen the sky on a really clear, moonless night, and in a place far from any lights, can truly appreciate its magnificence. Anyone sky-watching under such circumstances could be forgiven for seeing the Milky Way as being similar to a great silver river, snaking away across the sky.

A central theme of
The Orion Mystery
is the proximity of the three Giza pyramids to the River Nile. We know from inscriptions in tombs and temples, and from surviving papyrus documents, that the ancient Egyptians often referred to the Milky Way as the ‘Nile in the Sky’. Was it not likely, Bauval and Gilbert asked, that this association had been built into the attempt of the Egyptians to recreate Orion’s Belt on the ground? The idea seemed reasonable to us, and more so now because we realized immediately that a similar state of affairs existed at Thornborough. Looking down from the air it can be seen that the River Ure snakes past to one side of the super-henges – a not dissimilar situation to the one found at Giza with the pyramids and the river Nile. It has to be a possibility that those who laid out the three henges in North Yorkshire were also considering the adjacent river as an earthly representation of the Milky Way.

The work of Bauval and Gilbert has not been without its critics. One such criticism came from astronomer Ed Krupp of Griffith University Los Angeles. He suggested that the authors of
The Orion Mystery
were guilty of a deception in that they had ‘turned the map of Egypt upside down’ when demonstrating the similarity between the three major pyramids at Giza and the stars of Orion’s Belt. Robert Bauval in particular strenuously and staunchly defended the position he had taken in
The Orion Mystery
. He received support for the way he had handled his evidence from astronomers such as Archie Roy, emeritus professor at Glasgow University and Dr Percy Seymour, a South African astronomer and astrophysicist.

According to Robert Bauval’s theories it isn’t simply the three major pyramids representing Orion’s Belt that demonstrate the cosmological building efforts of the ancient Egyptians. He also sees other stars around Orion’s Belt as being represented by pyramids in locations elsewhere in the Egyptian desert sands. This may well be the case but our initial interest was focused on the three main pyramids at Giza – because of their Orion’s Belt associations and also on account of the megalithic measurements we had found there during the research for our book
Civilization One
.

We began to collect the most accurate measurements we could for the pyramids on the Giza Plateau. Clearly the plan of the pyramids was not as large as that of the Thornborough henges, even if the work that went into creating them was significantly greater. The direct measurement from henge A to henge C at Thornborough is 1,500 m, whereas the measurement, centre to centre, between the Great Pyramid (Khufu) and the smallest of the three pyramids (Menkaure) is about 943 m. Searching through as many records and surveys as we could, we came to the conclusion that the gap between the centre of Khufu’s pyramid and the centre pyramid (Khafre) is about 479 m and the gap between the centre pyramid and the southern pyramid of Menkaure is around 463 m.

Taking this information into account, we quite quickly discovered something that surprised us almost beyond belief. It became quite obvious that the ground plan for the three major pyramids on the Giza Plateau had not been planned in their native Egypt, but thousands of kilometres away – at the triple-henge site of Thornborough in Great Britain!

•

Robert Bauval caused a sensation when, together with Adrian Gilbert, he wrote
The Orion Mystery
back in 1994, which claimed that the Giza pyramids were planned as a representation of the stars of Orion’s Belt. It seems a reasonable enough claim, given that it is known that these stars were important to the pyramid builders, but virtually since the day it was written Egyptologists have been up in arms to dismiss it in favour of their own pet theories.

Robert may not walk like an Egyptian, but he certainly thinks like one, being born and brought up in Alexandria to parents of Belgian origin. He is a fluent Arabic speaker and has spent most of his life living and working in the Middle East and Africa as a construction engineer.

We decided that we needed to share our findings with Robert, who we knew had for some time lived in southern England. However, we soon found that he had left the country, having had the good fortune to sell his house just as the credit-crunch of 2008 hit the Western world. He was obviously missing the warmer climes of his youth in Alexandria as he had now taken an apartment on the Costa del Sol in southern Spain. By some coincidence Robert’s new residence was just a 15-minute drive from a house Chris has as a holiday home, so it was a simple matter to arrange a convenient date and time for a meeting.

We left England early on a very icy January morning and arrived less than three hours later to the pleasantly warm city of Malaga. Without hold baggage we picked up our hire car without delay and headed out on our 30-km journey down the motorway signposted to Cadiz. After calling at the local supermarket for some essential supplies we were soon sitting by the swimming pool in hot sunshine planning how best to introduce Robert Bauval to our discoveries.

We arrived at Robert’s home early the next day. It was a delightful apartment in a high building that gave him a fantastic panoramic view of the Mediterranean. In the first few hours we talked about many things and Chris was surprised to hear that a friend of his had visited Robert and his wife the previous evening. This was the American novelist, Katherine Neville. A few years earlier Chris had enjoyed a memorable dinner with Katherine and her husband, Professor Karl Pribram, the award-winning medical academic and neurosurgeon. The conversation had been delightfully varied, extending from the motive behind the fall of the Knights Templar to Karl’s latest researches into the quantum state of the Bose-Einstein condensate elements within the human brain.

We could only hope that today’s discussion was going to be as much fun – but hopefully less complicated!

Robert had invited his elder brother, John Paul, to join us. John Paul is an architect and has lived in this part of Spain for 45 years. He has been a major force in its development as a tourist location. But he is also a talented amateur mathematician, who was keen to hear more of the metrological properties underlying our findings.

Our meeting with Robert was going well. Both Robert and John Paul were excited about our discoveries, and Robert was finding powerful connections with his own recent researches. Both brothers immediately saw the logic of the 366-degree circle arising from the Earth’s axial spins per solar orbit. But when we discussed the 233-732 relationship used at Thornborough to produce a circle with a circumference of 2 × 366 equal units, Robert raised his hand in the air, as though calling for a pause in the conversation.

‘These numbers – 732 arising from double 366 with 233 and pi. We have also found these in Egypt – firstly at Saqqara by Jean-Philppe Lauer,’ Robert said, as he looked down at the plans of the British henges. He jumped up and retrieved a copy of his book,
The Egypt Code
, from his bookshelves. He flicked through the pages and pressed the book flat before passing it for us to see

The Saqqara pyramids are a few kilometres south of the Giza Plateau and some decades older. On a plan of the boundary wall Lauer had identified that the northern and southern walls of the boundary wall of the Djoser complex each had 2 × 366 panels. At first glance it appeared to be a ceremonial acknowledgement of a ‘magical’ number pattern rather than a practical application for astronomical purposes. But nonetheless, it was obvious that someone in Egypt knew about the importance of these values 100 years or so before the Giza trio were planned! This was getting very interesting.

After several hours of conversation we set out to walk to a fish restaurant, some 3 km along the beach, to continue our wide-ranging discussion. The sun shone with the power of a good English summer’s day, and the food was as good as the conversation. We continued talking as the sun fell lower across the sea.

As we walked back to Robert’s apartment, we wondered what he would make of hearing a new take on his famous Orion correlation theory. He might love it but, then again we were well aware that he might not.

Without doubt Robert Bauval is ‘master of the Giza Plateau’ and one does not lightly tell him that he might be wrong. So we didn’t attempt to. But we did show him an argument for considering one significant adjustment to his famous theory.

What we had found was based on our discovery that ancient cultures measured stars by timing their relative movements with pendulums. It seems that nobody, including Robert, had ever given a great deal of thought to how the pyramid builders of Giza had measured the relative position of the stars in order to map them so accurately onto the ground. It appears that most commentators have simply assumed the builders did it by looking upwards to gain a mental impression of the star group and then drawing the arrangement on a sheet of papyrus or a slate before evolving their awesome ground plan through artistic interpretation alone.

In our opinion this simply would not work, or rather it would not work to the level of accuracy we knew existed in terms of the Giza pyramids and Orion’s Belt.

Our years of work on prehistoric and ancient metrology had already taught us to respect these long-gone builders as true engineers, rather than casual artists. The magnificent quality of the Thornborough and Giza layouts screams out that there was heavy-duty science behind their unerring accuracy.

Because stars as seen in the night sky are little more than ‘pin pricks’ of light, any two stars can be compared with any two objects on the ground at any arbitrary scale. But when three stars are compared to three terrestrial objects, unless there is a flawless fit, one has to decide which two are correct (as two always will be) so that the degree of inaccuracy for the placement of the third can be established. The standard way of comparing the three main Giza pyramids with the shape of the stars of Orion’s Belt, both by Robert and his critics, is to consider Khufu’s and Khafre’s pyramids as being the ‘correct’ ones and then arguing a smallish error in the placing of Menkaure’s pyramid (the southernmost and by far the smallest of the three).

We are as certain as it is possible to be that this is not a correct assumption. Because the tool employed was the pendulum, and because we know from our findings at Thornborough and elsewhere that distances on the ground were direct translations of time in the sky, we knew that the outer two pyramids (Khafre and Menkaure) had to be positioned first and then the central pyramid of Khufu fitted in last.