Page 275 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Another authority felt that the careful and clever design of this strange
pyramid boat could potentially have made it ‘a far more seaworthy craft
than anything available to Columbus’. Moreover, the experts agreed that
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it had been built to a pattern that could only have been ‘created by
shipbuilders from a people with a long, solid tradition of sailing on the
open sea.’
8
Present at the very beginning of Egypt’s 3000-year history, who had
those as yet unidentified shipbuilders been? They had not accumulated
their ‘long, solid tradition of sailing on the open sea’ while ploughing the
fields of the landlocked Nile Valley. So where and when had they
developed their maritime skills?
There was yet another puzzle. I knew that the Ancient Egyptians had
been very good at making scale models and representations of all
manner of things for symbolic purposes. I therefore found it hard to
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understand why they would have gone to the trouble of manufacturing
and then burying a boat as big and sophisticated as this if its only
function, as the Egyptologists claimed, had been as a token of the
spiritual vessel that would carry the soul of the deceased king to
heaven. That could have been achieved as effectively with a much
10
smaller craft, and only one would have been needed, not several. Logic
therefore suggested that these gigantic vessels might have been intended
for some other purpose altogether, or had some quite different and still
unsuspected symbolic significance ...
We had reached the rough midpoint of the southern face of the Great
Pyramid when we at last realized why we were being taken on this long
walkabout. The objective was for us to be relieved of moderate sums of
money at each of the four cardinal points. The tally thus far was 30 US
dollars at the northern face and 50 Egyptian pounds at the eastern face.
Now I shelled out a further 50 Egyptian pounds to yet another patrol Ali
was supposed to have paid off the day before.
‘Ali,’ I hissed, ‘when are we going to climb the Pyramid?’
‘Right away, Mr. Graham,’ our guide replied. He walked confidently
forward, gesturing directly ahead, then added, ‘We shall ascend at the
south-west corner ...’

7 Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, pp. 132-3.
8 The Ra Expeditions, p. 16.
See, for example, Christine Desroches-Noblecourt, Tutankhamen, Penguin Books,
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London, 1989, pages 89, 108, 113, 283.
10 A.J. Spencer, The Great Pyramid Fact Sheet, P.J. Publications, 1989.

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