Page 316 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

liturgical texts. These appeared to indicate that the pyramids had been
seen as devices designed to turn dead men into immortal beings: to
‘throw open the doors of the firmament and make a road’, so that the
deceased pharaoh might ‘ascend into the company of the gods’.
26
I had no difficulty accepting that such a belief system might have been
at work here, and obviously it could have provided a motive for the whole
enterprise. Nevertheless, I was still puzzled why more than six million
tons of physical apparatus, intricately interlaced with channels and tubes,
corridors and chambers, had been deemed necessary to achieve a
mystical, spiritual and symbolic objective.
Being inside the Grand Gallery did feel like being inside an enormous
instrument. It had an undeniable aesthetic impact upon me (admittedly a
heavy and domineering one), but it was also completely devoid of
decorative features and of anything (figures of deities, reliefs of liturgical
texts, and so on) which might be suggestive of worship or religion. The
primary impression it conveyed was one of strict functionalism and
purposefulness—as though it had been built to do a job. At the same
time I was aware of its focused solemnity of style and gravity of manner,
which seemed to demand nothing less than serious and complete
attention.
By now I had climbed steadily through about half the length of the
Gallery. Ahead of me, and behind, shadows and light played tricks amid
the looming stone walls. Pausing, I turned my head, looking upwards
through the gloom towards the vaulted ceiling which supported the
crushing weight of the Great Pyramid of Egypt.
It suddenly hit me how dauntingly and disturbingly old it was, and how
completely my life at this moment depended on the skills of the ancient
builders. The hefty blocks that spanned the distant ceiling were examples
of those skills—every one of them laid at a slightly steeper gradient than
that of the Gallery. As the great archaeologist and surveyor Flinders Petrie
had observed, this had been done
in order that the lower edge of each stone should hitch like a pawl into a ratchet
cut into the top of the walls; hence no stone can press on the one below it, so as
to cause a cumulative pressure all down the roof; and each stone is separately
27
upheld by the side walls which it lies across.
And this was the work of a people whose civilization had only recently
emerged from neolithic hunter-gathering?
I began to walk up the Gallery again, using the 2-foot-deep central
flooring slot. A modern wooden covering fitted with helpful slats and side
railings made the ascent relatively easy. In antiquity, however, the floor
had been smoothly polished limestone, which, at a gradient of 26°, must
have been almost impossible to climb.
How had it been done? Had it been done at all?

26 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 281, Utt. 667A.
27 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 25.

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