Page 293 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

historical record indicates little in its favour.
For example, the upper end of the well-shaft was entered off the Grand
Gallery by the Oxford astronomer John Greaves in 1638. He managed to
descend to a depth of about sixty feet. In 1765 another Briton, Nathaniel
Davison, penetrated to a depth of about 150 feet but found his way
blocked by an impenetrable mass of sand and stones. Later, in the 1830s,
Captain G.B. Caviglia, an Italian adventurer, reached the same depth and
encountered the same obstacle. More enterprising than his predecessors,
he hired Arab workers to start excavating the rubble in the hope that
there might be something of interest beneath it. Several days of digging
in claustrophobic conditions followed before the connection with the
descending corridor was discovered.
17
Is it likely that such a cramped, blocked-up shaft could have been a
viable conduit for the treasures of Khufu, supposedly the greatest
pharaoh of the magnificent Fourth Dynasty?
Even if it hadn’t been choked with debris and sealed at the lower end, it
could not have been used to bring out more than a tiny fraction of the
treasures of a typical royal tomb. This is because the well-shaft is only
three feet in diameter and incorporates several tricky vertical sections.
At the very least, therefore, when Ma’mun and his men battered their
way into the King’s Chamber around the year AD 820, one would have
expected some of the bigger and heavier pieces from the original burial
to be still in place—like the statues and shrines that bulked so large in
Tutankhamen’s much later and presumably inferior tomb. But nothing
18
was found inside Khufu’s Pyramid, making this and the alleged looting of
Khafre’s monument the only tomb robberies in the history of Egypt which
achieved a clean sweep, leaving not a single trace behind—not a torn
cloth, not a shard of broken pottery, not an unwanted figurine, not an
overlooked piece of jewellery—just the bare floors and walls and the
gaping mouths of empty sarcophagi.

Not like other tombs

It was now after six in the morning and the rising sun had bathed the
summits of Khufu’s and Khafre’s Pyramids with a fleeting blush of pastel-
pink light. Menkaure’s Pyramid, being some 200 feet lower than the other
two, was still in shadow as Santha and I skirted its north-western corner
and continued our walk into the rolling sand dunes of the surrounding
desert.
I still had the tomb robbery theory on my mind. As far as I could see the
only real ‘evidence’ in favour of it was the absence of grave goods and
mummies that it had been invented to explain in the first place. All the

17 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, pp. 56-8.
18 See Nicholas Reeves, The Complete Tutankhamun, Thames & Hudson, London, 1990.

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