That is all well and good, until it is realised that Lehner’s Pyramid was very much a miniature version of the real thing — not much higher than a tall man with upraised arms. In fact, this stone Wendy House would perch comfortably on the very top of the Great Pyramid. Building a structure where you can easily manoeuvre large stones, if necessary by dragging them out on to the ground and starting again, is wildly different from constructing what was - until recently - the tallest building in the world, where there would have been no room for manoeuvre beyond the first few stone courses.
If the largest single artefact of ancient Egypt has the power to challenge our own sophisticated technology, spare a thought or two for some of the smallest. The Cairo Museum contains many of the sort of artefacts frequently overlooked by visitors, but they are almost, in their own way, as mysterious as the pyramids. For example, many small stone jars and bottles on closer examination prove to be extremely difficult to explain using mainstream academic arguments. We are asked to believe that the ancient Egyptians had only copper tools, yet what we have here are tiny vessels, some just 3 inches high, made of incredibly hard material such as granite. These bottles and vases have elegant, thin-rimmed, perfectly round openings, narrow necks and wider bodies, which have been hollowed out and shaped by a drill that entered through the narrow neck. But how? What diamond-tipped drill could create such extraordinary craftmanship even now? But why go to such lengths just to make a vase in the first place?
Other examples of precision drilling on the Giza plateau are found right under the noses of visitors and Egyptologists. In several places fallen masonry has exposed perfectly round bore holes in granite pillars, sometimes up to 10-12 inches deep, and they are perfectly round and precisely the same size all the way down. Archaeologists and Egyptologists vehemently deny that the ancients had tools such as lathes and drills on the apparently reasonable grounds that no remains of any such tool have ever been found. That may be unfortunate, but we have the evidence of our own eyes - and also that of an expert, the American tool designer and manufacturer Christopher Dunn. His analysis of certain Old Kingdom artefacts has convinced him that not only did the ancient Egyptians have drills, but that the drillholes in granite blocks could only have been achieved by a drill spinning 500 times faster than a modern, diamond-tipped drill.
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Dunn has proposed that the Egyptians used an ultrasonic drill, which uses sound to make the bit vibrate at an enormously high rate. Andrew Collins, in
Gods of Eden,
has developed the idea of sound technology used by the Egyptians and other ancient cultures and it does seem likely that they used what magi call the ‘Word’ — sound - to create many of the achievements that perplex us today.
Such theories go some way towards resolving the question of how the Egyptians were able to cut through solid granite as if it were butter, achieving precision work that would be extremely difficult — and in some cases, literally impossible — for us today, even with our computer-guided laser technology. But the question remains as to how they learned or developed their techniques. Clearly, since the pyramids and other enigmatic examples of their skill exist, they must have had such a technique, even though — bafflingly — no remnants of a drill or a lathe have ever been found. So we have another ‘impossible’ scenario: evidence of the results of this advanced technology, but no direct evidence of the technology itself. Therefore, say the academics, it’s back to those primitive copper tools, despite the fact that no known copper tool could drill perfectly round holes in granite ...
The implications of this mystery take us into a whole new realm. What we appear to have, in both the pyramids and the expertly drilled artefacts, is evidence of a people who seem to have emerged from an essentially Neolithic Stone Age culture into an advanced, organised civilisation capable of heroic building feats in, at most, just 500 years. As far as we can tell, the great monuments simply came into being without any real process of development.
Faced with this paradox, there seem to be only two ways to resolve it: by denying that the ancient Egyptians built the monuments, redating them so that they fit into a much earlier epoch and assigning them to an otherwise lost civilisation; or by positing the intrusion into Egyptian society of some other, more advanced culture that came from elsewhere and either taught the ancient Egyptians the necessary skills or built the monuments themselves.
Redating the most enigmatic monuments of Egypt would serve to explain why the archaeological record of the transition from Neolithic to sophisticated culture is incomplete. For example, the assumption that the Sphinx and the Giza pyramids were built by a lost civilisation in the remote past and that they already existed when the peoples of the Nile Valley were still in a Neolithic phase neatly explains the paradox. This idea was developed, for example, by Graham Hancock in his
Fingerprints of the Gods,
arguing that an advanced civilisation once existed, probably before the last Ice Age, but that it was struck down by some natural catastrophe. This reduced the survivors to a primitive level once more, so that the gradual climb up to a higher level of civilisation began again.
Naturally, the scenario of a civilisation that essentially began at its peak and then declined invites speculation. It is as if the first skyscraper was built within 500 years of woad-covered ancient Britons. For the analogy to be more precise, it would have to be impossible for all future generations to replicate that skyscraper, and for its means of construction to lie beyond their understanding, even when civilisation had progressed to space travel and computer wizardry.
Of course, for historians and Egyptologists, the idea of some hypothetical lost civilisation is beneath contempt. They claim that no evidence has ever been found to support this contention and so refuse even to consider it. Yet there is plenty of circumstantial evidence for the existence of this mysterious, lost ‘elder culture’. For example, many ancient maps - most famously the Piri Re’is map — appear to show that the globe was surveyed and very accurately mapped by an advanced culture in the distant past.
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Innumerable anomalous artefacts and monuments across the globe support the idea of a lost civilisation.
Where Egypt is concerned, the situation is not quite so clear-cut. If the standard dating of the Old Kingdom pyramids is correct — that is, they are at the most 5,000 years old — there is a problem. Five thousand years is by no means a long enough period in which to ‘lose’ an advanced civilisation, though there have been many recent attempts to assign much greater antiquity to some of the monuments at Giza, which have the advantage of allowing a longer time for most traces of this elder culture to have been lost.
On the other hand, some of the standard dates are undoubtedly correct. On the evidence as it now stands, it does appear that the Giza pyramids are ‘only’ as old as the history books say. This means that proponents of the ‘lost civilisation’ hypothesis also have to assume some form of continued contact between the ancient lost civilisation and the Egypt of the relatively recent era of the Old Kingdom, effectively putting them back where they started, because there is no archaeological evidence of such a continuity.
This confused logic can be a minefield for enthusiasts of the ‘lost civilisation’ theory. Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock argue that in 10,500 BCE (as we will see, a highly significant date to them), an advanced culture in Egypt decided upon the ground plan of the Giza complex.
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For those authors, and many others, this mysterious elder culture consisted of the survivors of the great catastrophe that destroyed Atlantis. These Atlanteans were, it is asserted, incredibly sophisticated. It was their input that created the anomalous technological wonders of the ancient world.
But much of Bauval and Hancock’s own evidence also supports the standard dating of the pyramids, so we have to assume that this civilisation of 10,500 BCE continued in some way so that it could build the Great Pyramid around 2500 BCE, as is generally agreed. This is a gap of 8,000 years: it is frankly incredible that there should be no remaining traces of such a culture. If it did survive until 2500 BCE, what became of it then?
Andrew Collins, in
From the Ashes of Angels,
has proposed that the elder culture that existed in Egypt in remote antiquity took refuge, because of some catastrophe, in the mountains of Kurdistan, in such sites as the fabulous underground city of Çatal Hüyük, to re-emerge centuries later to pass some of their knowledge on to the peoples of Egypt and Sumer. This would account for the sudden eruption of civilisation in those two centres at about the same time. Even so, we are still left with the same central problem: why come out of hiding, build some anomalously impressive structures at Giza that still defy explanation, and then vanish again?
The other theory to account for the paradoxes of the pyramids proposes that the knowledge did not come from a lost, human civilisation, but that it was brought to Earth by extraterrestrials. The ‘ancient astronaut’ school of thought first came to the notice of a wide audience in the 1960s and 1970s, thanks to the phenomenally successful books of Erich von Däniken. Although now largely dismissed as sadly lacking in persuasive evidence, there is no doubting the incredible influence of
Chariots of the Gods?
and its sequels, nor the way that the whole concept of the gods as spacemen was enthusiastically accepted by millions for the first time, entering irreversibly into our collective consciousness. Since von Däniken seized the popular imagination, others - notably Zecharia Sitchin and, more recently, Alan F. Alford - have promoted similar ideas. This school interprets the myths of the ancient world as romanticised memories of encounters with extraterrestrial beings and their technology. The ‘gods’ are simply biological entities who have developed an advanced, spacefaring civilisation. It also attempts to explain the anomalies of ancient technologies, such as the pyramids, as the result of such contact.
It is possible that there are many other inhabited planets in the universe, some of which may have developed to a point where interstellar travel is routine. However, the evidence put forward by the proponents of the ancient astronaut theory is far from conclusive, and by its very nature it is largely speculative. Besides, their rather mechanistic and materialist interpretation of ancient myths - that the gods were physical space travellers — only too often seems contrived, and completely ignores the elements of mysticism and ineffability in the history of human religion.
While we have no overwhelming personal or logical objections to Atlantis, the elder culture or the extraterrestrial hypotheses, we are concerned with another aspect of the ‘New Orthodoxy’. This is the insistence that new discoveries about our past have a significance that goes well beyond merely rewriting history. This is the claim that, in some way, the ancient Egyptian civilisation has a direct relevance to us today, that it has left some kind of ‘message’ that will bring about real changes in our immediate future ...
Sirius revisited
One of the most influential books ever written about the mysteries of Egypt is Robert Temple’s
The Sirius Mystery,
originally published in 1976, and with an extensively revised edition in 1998. As the inspiration for writers who wished to reconsider the ancient past, this book actually spawned much of the current New Orthodoxy.
Temple began by considering a puzzle posed by the Dogon people, who live in the West African country of Mali. The Dogon have an elaborate system of belief that centres on the importance of the star Sirius, which is, in galactic terms, a near neighbour. At 8.7 light years away it is the second closest star to our own solar system. Two French anthropologists, Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, who lived with and studied the Dogon for many years before and after the Second World War, had noted one very curious feature: the Dogon believed that Sirius was accompanied by another star, of incredible heaviness, which was invisible. They called it
po tolo
— the
po
star.
(Po
is a tiny seed of a type of cereal known as fonio, aptly encapsulating the smallness of the star.) In fact, it is now known that Sirius is a binary (or perhaps even trinary) star system, and that the bright star we can see from Earth has a companion invisible to the naked eye — or, indeed, to any but the most powerful telescopes. The existence of Sirius B, as the companion star is known, was only suspected by astronomers in the first decades of the nineteenth century, when anomalies in Sirius’s movements suggested the gravitational pull of a massive celestial body nearby. It was not conclusively observed until 1842, and not photographed until 1970.
It is now known that Sirius B is a white dwarf star, one that is composed of extremely dense matter so that, although relatively small, it still exerts a huge gravitational pull. Amazingly, the Dogon even appear to know the period that Sirius B takes - about fifty years — to orbit around its larger companion. They commemorate this with a special ceremony that takes place every hundred years, but it counts as fifty, because of their peculiar ‘double-year’ calendar system.
The Dogon also claim that Sirius is, in fact, a trinary system - a third star, which they call the ‘Star of Women’ (emme ya tolo) is also in orbit around Sirius A. When Temple wrote the original version of
The Sirius Mystery,
the existence of Sirius C had, in fact, been proposed, but not conclusively proven by astronomers. Temple claims that, since then, the existence of Sirius C has been proven and accepted by astronomers, further evidence of the extraordinary knowledge of the Dogon.
The Dogon’s knowledge about the existence of Sirius B still mystifies. They, in fact, have an even more extensive knowledge of the cosmos than Temple describes in his book.
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In addition to knowing about the existence of the rings of Saturn and the major moons of Jupiter, they know that the Milky Way really moves in the form of a spiral, that our moon is lifeless and that Earth spins on its axis. They know that the stars are really suns - for example, their alternative name for the Star of Women (Sirius C) is
yau nay dagi,
which means the ‘Little Sun of Women’.