Page 287 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

On its north and west sides the Second Pyramid sat on a level platform
cut down out of the surrounding bedrock and was thus enclosed within a
wide trench more than 15 feet deep in places. Walking due south, parallel
to the monument’s scarred western flank, we picked our way along the
edge of this trench towards the much smaller Third Pyramid, which lay
some 400 metres ahead of us in the desert.
Khufu ... Khafre ... Menkaure ... According to all orthodox Egyptologists
the pyramids had been built as tombs—and only as tombs—for these
three pharaohs. Yet there were some obvious difficulties with such
assertions. For example, the spacious burial chamber of the Khafre
Pyramid was empty when it was opened in 1818 by the European explorer
Giovanni Belzoni. Indeed, more than empty, the chamber was starkly,
austerely bare. The polished granite sarcophagus which lay embedded in
its floor had also been found empty, with its lid broken into two pieces
nearby. How was this to be explained?
2
To Egyptologists the answer seemed obvious. At some early date,
probably not many hundreds of years after Khafre’s death, tomb robbers
must have penetrated the chamber and cleared all its contents including
the mummified body of the pharaoh.
Much the same thing seemed to have happened at the smaller Third
Pyramid, towards which Santha and I were now walking—that attributed
to Menkaure. Here the first European to break in had been a British
colonel, Howard Vyse, who had entered the burial chamber in 1837. He
found an empty basalt sarcophagus, an anthropoid coffin lid made of
wood, and some bones. The natural assumption was that these were the
remains of Menkaure. Modern science had subsequently proved, however,
that the bones and coffin lid dated from the early Christian era, that is,
from 2500 years after the Pyramid Age, and thus represented the
‘intrusive burial’ of a much later individual (quite a common practice
throughout Ancient Egyptian history). As to the basalt sarcophagus—well,
it could have belonged to Menkaure. Unfortunately, however, nobody had
the opportunity to examine it because it had been lost at sea when the
ship on which Vyse sent it to England had sunk off the coast of Spain.
3
Since it was a matter of record that the sarcophagus had been found
empty by Vyse, it was once again assumed that the body of the pharaoh
must have been removed by tomb robbers.
A similar assumption had been made about the body of Khufu, which
was also missing. Here the scholarly consensus, expressed as well as
anyone by George Hart of the British Museum, was that ‘no later than 500
years after Khufu’s funeral’ robbers had forced their way into the Great
Pyramid ‘to steal the burial treasure’. The implication is that this
4
incursion must have occurred by or before 2000 BC—since Khufu is

The Riddle of the Pyramids, p. 54.
2
3 Ibid., p. 55.
4 George Hart, Pharaohs and Pyramids, Guild Publishing, London, 1991, p. 91.

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