Page 305 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

builders in the Archaic Period had been Zoser, the second pharaoh of the
Third Dynasty, to whom was attributed the construction of the ‘Step
Pyramid’ at Saqqara, and Zoser’s successor, Sekhemkhet, whose
13
pyramid also stood at Saqqara. Therefore, despite the lack of inscriptions,
it was now assumed as obvious that the three pyramids at Giza must have
been built by Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure and must have been intended
to serve as their tombs.
We need not reiterate here the many shortcomings of the ‘tombs and
tombs only’ theory. However, these shortcomings were not limited to the
Giza pyramids but applied to all the other Third and Fourth Dynasty
Pyramids listed above. Not a single one of these monuments had ever
been found to contain the body of a pharaoh, or any signs whatsoever of
a royal burial. Some of them were not even equipped with sarcophagi,
14
for example the Collapsed Pyramid at Meidum. The Pyramid of
Sekhemkhet at Saqqara (first entered in 1954 by the Egyptian Antiquities
Organization) did contain a sarcophagus—one, which had certainly
remained sealed and undisturbed since its installation in the ‘tomb’.
15
Grave robbers had never succeeded in finding their way to it, but when it
was opened, it was empty.
16
So what was going on? How come more than twenty-five million tons of
stone had been piled up to form pyramids at Giza, Dahshur, Meidum and
Saqqara if the only point of the exercise had been to install empty
sarcophagi in empty chambers? Even admitting the hypothetical excesses
of one or two megalomaniacs, it seemed unlikely that a whole succession
of pharaohs would have sanctioned such wastefulness.

Pandora’s Box

Buried beneath the five million tons of the Second Pyramid at Giza,
Santha and I now stepped into the monument’s spacious inner chamber,
which might have been a tomb but might equally have served some other
as yet unidentified purpose. Measuring 46.5 feet in length from east to
west, and 16.5 in breadth from north to south, this naked and sterile
apartment was topped off with an immensely strong gabled ceiling
reaching a height of 22.5 feet at its apex. The gable slabs, each a
massive 20-ton limestone monolith, had been laid in position at an angle
of 53° 7’ 28” (which exactly matched the angle of slope of the pyramid’s
sides). Here there were no relieving chambers (as there were above the
17
King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid). Instead, for more than 4000

13 Ibid., pp. 36-9.
14 Ibid., p. 74.
Ibid., p. 42.
15
16 Ibid.
17 The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 123; The Pyramids Of Egypt, p. 118.

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