Page 297 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

information in the Inventory Stela contradicted that opinion?

Overview

By seven in the morning Santha and I had walked far out into the desert
to the south-west of the Giza pyramids and had made ourselves
comfortable in the lee of a huge dune that offered an unobstructed
panorama over the entire site.
The date, 16 March, was just a few days away from the Spring Equinox,
one of the two occasions in the year when the sun rose precisely due east
of wherever you stood in the world. Ticking out the days like the pointer
of a giant metronome, it had bisected the horizon this morning at a point
a hair’s breadth south of due east and had already climbed high enough
to shrug off the Nile mists which clung like a shroud to much of the city
of Cairo.
Khufu, Khafre, Menkaure ... Cheops, Chephren, Mycerinus. Whether you
called them by their Egyptian or their Greek names, there was no doubt
that the three famous pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty had been
commemorated by the most splendid, the most honourable, the most
beautiful and the most enormous monuments ever seen anywhere in the
world. Moreover, it was clear that these pharaohs must indeed have been
closely associated with the monuments, not only because of the folklore
passed on by Herodotus (which surely had some basis in fact) but
because inscriptions and references to Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure had
been found in moderate quantities, outside the three major pyramids, at
several different parts of the Giza necropolis. Such finds had been made
consistently in and around the six subsidiary pyramids, three of which lay
to the east of the Great Pyramid and the other three to the south of the
Menkaure Pyramid.
Since much of this external evidence was ambiguous and uncertain, I
found it difficult to understand why the Egyptologists were happy to go
on citing it as confirmation of the ‘tombs and tombs only’ theory.
The problem was that this same evidence was capable of supporting—
as equally valid—a number of different and mutually contradictory
interpretations. To give just one example, the ‘close association’
observed between the three great pyramids and the three Fourth Dynasty
pharaohs could indeed have come about because these pharaohs had
built the pyramids as their tombs. But it could also have come about if
the gigantic monuments of the Giza plateau had been standing long
before the dawn of the historical civilization known as Dynastic Egypt. In
that case, it was only necessary to assume that in due course Khufu,
Khafre and Menkaure had come along and built a number of the
subsidiary structures around the three older pyramids—something that
they would have had every reason to do because in this way they could
have appropriated the high prestige of the original anonymous

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