The Secret Chamber of Osiris: Lost Knowledge of the Sixteen Pyramids (2 page)

CAIRO, MARCH 22, 2008, 11:30 A.M.

The hotel lobby was abuzz with tourists from just about every conceivable corner of the globe, most clustered in small groups, chatting avidly about their excursions from the previous day: up to Alexandria, down to Karnak, or over to the Great Pyramid at Giza. It was impossible not to find yourself affected by the sheer sense of expectation and excitement rising from their collective voice as the next exhilarating chapter of their Egyptian adventure was about to unfold: the Sphinx, a Nile cruise, the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo, the Valley of the Kings. Or a thousand and one other marvels this ancient country has to offer.

Without doubt, however, not one of them would be embarking on the little adventure I had planned for myself that day—a seven-kilometer round-trip into the fringes of the western Egyptian desert, far from the throngs of bustling, chattering tourists that flocked in endless streams to absorb the delights of Egypt’s more obvious attractions.

This was the start of an adventure that had, by this time, been over two years in the making, an adventure that had begun with a simple idea, a fleeting moment of inspired thought that had been burning in my mind from that first moment of epiphany some years back to my presence now in Egypt. And the thought that I was now here at Giza in the shadow of the great pyramids to pursue my curiosity brought with it a near permanent broad smile to my face, and more often than not this had others looking at me quizzically, wondering what secret lay behind my barely concealed excitement. One or two people I’d been chatting with at breakfast that morning had asked of my plans for the day, and I had simply told them that I’d be going on a long walk of discovery. This was all perfectly true, although the “discovery” part remained to be seen. I could sense, though, from their polite questioning, that they knew I was not being entirely open with them. The simple fact was, I couldn’t be. Not yet; it was much too early.

After a few minutes impatiently pacing back and forth around the foyer, I was approached by the hotel concierge, who told me that my taxi was waiting outside. This was it; my quest to discover the legendary chamber of Osiris had finally begun. I quickly gathered my belongings from the lobby floor—backpack, the obligatory hat, and camera—and hurried through the sliding doors out into the blazing sunshine. Even this early in the day and year, Giza’s climate was far from kind to a fair-skinned Scotsman more used to battling through sheets of horizontal rain than sweltering under a vertical wall of searing heat. For sure, before the day was out, I would be slapping on the sunblock aplenty and using every fluid ounce of water I had packed.

Before climbing into the taxi I made one final check inside my backpack, double-checking that everything was there—water, sunblock, Ordnance Survey maps, compass, pedometer, and, of course, the small, granite pyramid “capstone” I had carried with me all the way from my home in Scotland to Giza—my very own “philosopher’s stone,” my “gift to Osiris.”

Finding everything in order, I clambered into the beat-up taxi and gave the driver my destination—the amphitheater at Giza. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t seem to understand my broad Scottish brogue. And speaking little to zero Egyptian Arabic, I took the backpack and pulled out a map, held it up, and pointed to the open-air theater that stood just to the west of the pyramid of Khafre (
Chephren
in Greek), the second largest of the Giza pyramids (although it actually appears larger than Khufu’s Great Pyramid as a result of it having been built on the central, high ground of the plateau).

The driver squinted his eyes at the map, shook his head, and spoke in broken English. “No theater. Gone. Theater closed.”

“Yes, I know it’s closed,” I said, nodding reassuringly. “Theater please.” I tapped a finger on the map a couple of times, as if this would somehow convey to the driver that I knew what I was doing, even if he didn’t. He casually shrugged his shoulders, muttered something in Arabic, puffed on his cigarette, slipped the car into gear, and we set off.

I had traveled by bus and taxi a number of times by then in and around Cairo and had come to learn that each new experience would surely be no less hair-raising than all the others. Taxis, buses, trucks, horses with carts, and donkeys all shared the same highway, and it didn’t seem to perturb any of them how slow or fast they traveled; there didn’t seem to be a speed limit. Vehicles had indicators, but these were rarely, if ever, used. By far the “indicator” of choice was the car horn, thousands of them beeping and blasting in a cacophony of noise at anything that came too close or insisted in squeezing past. Buses and trucks casually drifted across lanes toward each other almost at will and would have made a taxi sandwich of us on a number of occasions but for the sharp braking or accelerating of my driver who, after a few sharp blasts on his own car horn, was otherwise underwhelmed by it, seemed to take it all in his stride—a typical day at the office. I lost count of the number of times I found myself gnawing on a knuckle as some pedestrian stepped straight out into the oncoming traffic, hand aloft like a police traffic controller in order to get himself across the busy road.

I’d been in the taxi no more than ten minutes when, in the distance, a great geometrical shape suddenly appeared on the horizon, towering high above the urban sprawl of houses, shops, high-rise apartment buildings, and construction cranes: the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, known to Egyptologists simply as G1. It was hard to imagine that thousands of years ago this entire area—but for the pyramid site itself—would have been nothing but remote and empty desert for as far as the eye could see. The main method of transportation in ancient times wouldn’t have been by motor vehicle on bustling, crazy highways but rather by boat along the banks of the great River Nile, the main artery and lifeblood of the country. Egypt truly was, as the Greek historian Herodotus had written more than two millennia ago, the “Gift of the Nile,” for without this great waterway irrigating and fertilizing the Nile Valley for thousands of miles, Egypt simply could never and would never have existed.

Seeing the Great Pyramid looming large on the horizon brought back memories of my first visit to this magnificent monument some two days earlier on the spring equinox, when, in the company of world-renowned alternative historians and authors Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval, I stood in humble, reverent silence between the paws of the Sphinx, watching the equinoctial sunrise. At this special time of year at Giza the eternal gaze of the Sphinx is fixed due east, directly on the disc of the sun as it begins to peep over the eastern horizon—truly a spectacular sight to behold (see figure 1.1).

As the blazing golden orb of the sun gradually emerged ahead, behind us the last flicker of a glorious silver moon was sinking in the west beyond the darkened silhouette of Khafre’s majestic pyramid, these wondrous, celestial mechanics drawing gasps of fascination and delight from a few other hardy souls who had ventured out that early, chilly March morning to bear witness to this unique and awe-inspiring spectacle.

Figure 1.1. The Sphinx greets the dawn.

Thirty minutes or so later the entire Giza plateau was tinged with golden-orange hues from the newly risen sun, and farther up the plateau in the distance the eastern flanks of the three giant pyramids were burning a fiery red, just as they had done for thousands of years. From my vantage point at the rear of the Sphinx enclosure I had a grand view of all three of the main pyramids, although the base of the Great Pyramid was partially obscured here by the rise of the plateau. With these three giant geometric shapes thrusting up from the desert sands into a cloudless sky, it was truly surreal, a landscape that seemed more like something from the movie
2001: A Space Odyssey
than something created from the hands of an ancient people who had lived thousands of years earlier at the dawn of history.

From this distance the triangular form of the pyramids appeared quite perfect, the ragged edges of the layers upon layers of stacked limestone blocks barely perceptible. The outer casing stones of white Tura limestone that had once made the pyramid’s sides perfectly smooth (rather than their current stepped appearance) had long since vanished after an earthquake in medieval times had apparently loosened them, bringing them crashing to the ground, whereupon the grateful citizens of Cairo quarried them for various new buildings and monuments around the ancient city. Today at Giza only the uppermost section of Khafre’s Pyramid and the bases of Khufu’s and Menkaure’s Pyramids still present some of these smooth outer casing stones.

My objective that first morning had been to visit the Great Pyramid, which Egyptologists have attributed to Khufu (
Cheops
in Greek), the second king of the Fourth Dynasty of ancient Egypt, who, according to Egyptologists, lived circa 2,550 BCE. I had a very particular reason for wanting to visit the Great Pyramid and especially so at this special time of the year, at sunrise during the spring (vernal) equinox.

In the company of Bauval, I trudged up the sloping plateau in the direction of Khafre’s Pyramid, roughly following the line of the great causeway that had once run from the Valley and Sphinx Temples (which, in ancient times, would have graced a small harbor on the banks of the Nile) up to the ruins of the so-called Mortuary Temple, which had once stood on the east face of the pyramid. Something about this placement of Khafre’s Pyramid on the plateau had always puzzled me; I turned to Bauval.

“Robert,” I began as we walked together up the gentle slope of the plateau toward the middle pyramid of Khafre, “if Khufu was the first king to build a pyramid here on the plateau, why did he not choose for himself the high, central ground where Khafre built his pyramid? Why did Khufu opt to build his pyramid over on the lower ground at the very edge of the plateau? Surely if Khufu was the first king to build a pyramid here at Giza he would have chosen the high, central ground of the plateau. By doing that he could have ensured that no future king would have been able to surpass his achievement. Why didn’t Khufu build his pyramid on the high ground of the plateau?”

With his customary enigmatic smile, Bauval replied simply, “Because, Scott, there was a plan—a grand plan.”

There was little need for Bauval to say any more. I knew he was right, although it had taken me many years of research on my own to become convinced of such a grand plan. Conventional Egyptology, however, has little time for such suggestions. To the Egyptologists the pyramids—all of them—simply reflected the will of the particular king in whose name each pyramid was supposedly built (as his eternal tomb). Ideas of a preconceived, grand, unified plan are summarily dismissed. The pyramids, the Egyptologists insist, were singular, royal funerary edifices built in splendid isolation on the whim of the ruling king with little or no regard for what had gone before or would come after. In short, the pyramids were not built to satisfy the requirements of any grand, preconceived plan, as a growing number of independent researchers have long argued, but each one is simply the tomb of each individual ancient Egyptian king.

Of course, for Egyptologists to accept the notion that there was a grand, preconceived, transgenerational project that had been set in motion by the ancient Egyptians to build a whole series of giant pyramids (about sixteen of them) would place a serious question mark over the Egyptologists’ tomb theory, so it is understandable why most Egyptologists have rejected such ideas out of hand; a “grand, preconceived plan” and the “tombs of kings” are essentially ideas that are regarded as being mutually exclusive. However, as will be demonstrated throughout the course of this book, the evidence in support of such a preconceived, transgenerational grand plan is considerable and should not be so readily dismissed.

Snaking up the plateau, Bauval and I veered off to the right in the direction of the Great Pyramid. From where I was now standing, close to its southeast corner, the light was just right for me to see what I had come here and hoped, on that special day of the year, to observe. It is a feature of the Great Pyramid that was first observed by early European pyramid explorers at the beginning of the eighteenth century and is probably best described by modern Egyptologist J. P. Lepre.

One very unusual feature of the Great Pyramid is a concavity of the core that makes the monument an eight-sided figure, rather than four-sided like every other Egyptian pyramid. That is to say, that its four sides are hollowed in or indented along their central lines, from base to peak. This concavity divides each of the apparent four sides in half, creating a very special and unusual eight-sided pyramid; and it is executed to such an extraordinary degree of precision as to enter the realm of the uncanny. For, viewed from any ground position or distance, this concavity is quite invisible to the naked eye. The hollowing-in can be noticed only from the air, and only at certain times of the day. This explains why virtually every available photograph of the Great Pyramid does not show the hollowing-in phenomenon, and why the concavity was never discovered until the age of aviation. It was discovered quite by accident in 1940, when a British Air Force pilot, P. Groves, was flying over the pyramid. He happened to notice the concavity and captured it in the now-famous photograph.
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