Page 345 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

mathematicians and astronomers, had borne out his inspired hunch. His
evidence (reviewed fully in Chapter Forty-nine) showed that the three
pyramids were an unbelievably precise terrestrial map of the three stars
of Orion’s belt, accurately reflecting the angles between each of them and
even (by means of their respective sizes) providing some indication of
their individual magnitudes. Moreover, this map extended outwards to
6
the north and south to encompass several other structures on the Giza
plateau—once again with faultless precision. However, the real surprise
7
revealed by Bauval’s astronomical calculations was this: despite the fact
that some aspects of the Great Pyramid did relate astronomically to the
Pyramid Age, the Giza monuments as a whole were so arranged as to
provide a picture of the skies (which alter their appearance down the ages
as a result of precession of the equinoxes) not as they had looked in the
Fourth Dynasty around 2500 BC, but as they had looked—and only as they
had looked—around the year 10,450 BC.
8
I had come to Egypt to go over the Giza site with Robert Bauval and to
question him about his star-correlation theory. In addition I wanted to
canvass his views on what sort of human society, if any, could have had
the technological know-how, such a very long while ago, to measure
accurately the altitudes of the stars and to devise a plan as mathematical
and ambitious as that of the Giza necropolis.
I had also come to meet another researcher who had challenged the
orthodox chronology of Ancient Egypt with a well-founded claim to have
found hard evidence of a high civilization in the Nile Valley in 10,000 BC
or earlier. Like Bauval’s astronomical data, the evidence had always been
available but had failed to attract the attention of established
Egyptologists. The man responsible for bringing it before the public now
was the American scholar, John Anthony West, who argued that the
specialists had missed it—not because they had failed to find it, but
because they had found it and had failed to interpret it properly.
9
West’s evidence focused on certain key structures, notably the Great
Sphinx and the Valley Temple at Giza and, much farther south, the
mysterious Osireion at Abydos. He argued that these desert monuments
showed many scientifically unmistakable signs of having been weathered
by water, an erosive agent they could only have been exposed to in
sufficient quantities during the damp ‘pluvial’ period that accompanied
the end of the last Ice Age around the eleventh millennium BC. The
10
implication of this peculiar and extremely distinctive pattern of
‘precipitation induced’ weathering, was that the Osireion, the Sphinx, and

6 The Orion Mystery.
7 Ibid.
Ibid.
8
9 Serpent in the Sky, pp. 184-242.
10 Ibid., 186-7.

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