Page 274 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

We walked on, reaching the south-eastern corner at a little after 4:15
a.m.
Very few modern buildings, even the houses we live in, have corners
that consist of perfect ninety degree right angles; it is common for them
to be a degree or more out of true. It doesn’t make any difference
structurally and nobody notices such minute errors. In the case of the
Great Pyramid, however, I knew that the ancient master-builders had
found a way to narrow the margin of error to almost nothing. Thus, while
falling short of the perfect ninety degrees, the south-eastern corner
achieved an impressive 89° 56’ 27”. The north-eastern corner measured
90° 3’ 2”; the southwestern 90° 0’ 33”, and the north-western was just two
seconds of a degree out of true at 89° 59’ 58”.
4
This was, of course, extraordinary. And like almost everything else
about the Great Pyramid it was also extremely difficult to explain. Such
accurate building techniques—as accurate as the best we have today—
could have evolved only after thousands of years of development and
experimentation. Yet there was no evidence that any process of this kind
had ever taken place in Egypt. The Great Pyramid and its neighbours at
Giza had emerged out of a black hole in architectural history so deep and
so wide that neither its bottom nor its far side had ever been identified.

Ships in the desert

Guided by the increasingly perspiring Ali, who had not yet explained why
it was necessary for us to circumnavigate the Pyramid before climbing it,
we now began to make our way in a westerly direction along the
monument’s southern side. Here there were two further boat-shaped pits,
one of which, although still sealed, had been investigated with fibre-optic
cameras and was known to contain a high-prowed sea-going vessel more
than 100 feet long. The other pit had been excavated in the 1950s. Its
contents—an even larger seagoing vessel, a full 141 feet in length —had
5
been placed in the so-called Boat Museum, an ugly modern structure that
gangled on stilts beneath the south face of the Pyramid.
Made of cedarwood, the beautiful ship in the museum was still in
perfect condition 4500 years after it had been built. With a displacement
of around 40 tons, its design was particularly thought-provoking,
incorporating, in the words of one expert, ‘all the sea-going ship’s
characteristic properties, with prow and stern soaring upward, higher
than in a Viking ship, to ride out the breakers and high seas, not to
contend with the little ripples of the Nile.’
6

4 Ibid., p. 87.
See Lionel Casson, Ships and Seafaring in Ancient Times, University of Texas Press,
5
1994, p. 17; The Ra Expeditions, p. 15.
6 The Ra Expeditions, p. 17.

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