Page 343 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

precessional motion that were so accurate and so consistent it was
extremely difficult to attribute them to chance. Nor did it seem likely to
be an accident that the jackal god had been assigned a role centre-stage
in the drama, serving as the spirit guide of Osiris on his journey through
the underworld. It was tempting, too, to wonder whether there was any
2
significance in the fact that in ancient times Anubis had been referred to
by Egyptian priests as the ‘guardian of the secret and sacred writings’. )
3
Under the grooved edge of the gilded casket on which his effigy now
crouched was found an inscription: ‘initiated into the secrets’.
4
Alternative translations of the same hieroglyphic text rendered it
variously as ‘he who is upon the secrets’, and as ‘guardian of the
secrets’.
5
But were there any secrets left in Egypt?
After more than a century of intensive archaeological investigations,
could the sands of this antique land yield any further surprises?

Bauval’s Stars and West’s Stones

In 1993 there was an astonishing new discovery which suggested that
there was much still to learn about Ancient Egypt. The discoverer,
moreover, was not some astigmatic archaeologist sieving his way through
the dust of ages but an outsider to the field: Robert Bauval, a Belgian
construction engineer with a flair for astronomy who observed a
correlation in the sky that the experts had missed in their fixation with
the ground at their feet.
What Bauval saw was this: as the three belt stars of the Orion
constellation crossed the merdian at Giza they lay in a not quite straight
line high in the southern heavens. The lower two stars, Al Nitak and Al
Nilam, formed a perfect diagonal but the third star, Mintaka, appeared to
be offset to the observer’s left, that is, towards the east.

2 The Gods of the Egyptians, volume II, pp. 262-6.
3 Lucy Lamy, Egyptian Mysteries, Thames & Hudson, London, 1986, p. 93.
4 Jean-Pierre Corteggiani, The Egypt of the Pharaohs at the Cairo Museum, Scala
Publications, London, 1987, p. 118.
5 Ibid.; see also R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, Sacred Science: The King of Pharaonic
Theocracy, Inner Traditions International, Rochester, 1988, pp. 182-3.

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