Page 308 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

entering a cave or grotto cut into the side of a mountain; it lacked the
sense of deliberate and geometrical purposefulness that would have been
conveyed by the original descending corridor. Worse still, the dark and
inauspicious horizontal tunnel leading inwards looked like an ugly,
deformed thing and still bore the marks of violence where the Arab
workmen had alternately heated and chilled the stones with fierce fires
and cold vinegar before attacking them with hammers and chisels,
battering rams and borers.
On the one hand, such vandalism seemed gross and irresponsible. On
the other, a startling possibility had to be considered: was there not a
sense in which the pyramid seemed to have been designed to invite
human beings of intelligence and curiosity to penetrate its mysteries?
After all, if you were a pharaoh who wanted to ensure that his deceased
body remained inviolate for eternity, would it make better sense (a) to
advertise to your own and all subsequent generations the whereabouts of
your burial place, or (b) to choose some secret and unknown location, of
which you would never speak and where you might never be found?
The answer was obvious: you would go for secrecy and seclusion, as the
vast majority of the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt had done.
3
Why, then, if it was indeed a royal tomb, was the Great Pyramid so
conspicuous? Why did it occupy a ground area of more than thirteen
acres? Why was it almost 500 feet high? Why, in other words, if its
purpose was to conceal and protect the body of Khufu, had it been
designed so that it could not fail to attract the attention—in all epochs
and under all imaginable circumstances—of treasure-crazed adventurers
and of prying and imaginative intellectuals?
It was simply not credible that the brilliant architects, stonemasons,
surveyors and engineers who had created the Great Pyramid could have
been ignorant of basic human psychology. The vast ambition and the
transcendent beauty, power and artistry of their handiwork spoke of
refined skills, deep insight, and a complete understanding of the symbols
and primordial patterns by which the minds of men could be
manipulated. Logic therefore suggested that the pyramid builders must
also have understood exactly what kind of beacon they were piling up
(with such incredible precision) on this windswept plateau, on the west
bank of the Nile, in those high and far away times.
They must, in short, have wanted this remarkable structure to exert a
perennial fascination: to be violated by intruders, to be measured with
increasing degrees of exactitude, and to haunt the collective imagination
of mankind like a persistent ghost summoning intimations of a profound
and long-forgotten secret.

3 In the isolated Valley of the Kings in Luxor in upper Egypt, for example.

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