Page 405 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

started travelling in Egypt. His guide-book, The Traveller’s Key had been
a brilliant and indispensable introduction to the mysteries of this ancient
land, and we still carried it with us. At the same time his scholarly works,
notably Serpent in the Sky, had opened our eyes to the revolutionary
possibility that Egyptian civilization—with its manifold glimpses of high
science apparently out of place in time—might not have developed
entirely within the confines of the Nile Valley but might have been a
legacy of some earlier, greater and as yet unidentified civilization
‘antedating dynastic Egypt, and all other known civilizations, by
millennia’.
1
Tall and strongly built, West was in his early sixties. He had cultivated a
neatly trimmed white beard, was dressed in a khaki safari-suit and wore
an eccentric nineteenth-century pith helmet. His manner was youthful and
energetic and there was a roguish sparkle in his eyes.
The three of us were sitting on the open upper deck of a Nile cruiser,
moored off the corniche in Luxor just a few yards downstream from the
Winter Palace Hotel. To our west, across the river, a big red sun, distorted
by atmospheric refraction, was setting behind the cliffs of the Valley of
the Kings. To our east lay the battered but noble ruins of the Luxor and
Karnak temples. Beneath us, transmitted through the hull of the boat, we
could feel the lap and flow of the water as it rolled by on its meridional
course towards the far-off Delta.
West had first presented his thesis for an older Sphinx in Serpent in the
Sky, a comprehensive exposition of the work of the French
mathematician R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz. Schwaller’s research at the Luxor
Temple between 1937 and 1952 had unearthed mathematical evidence
which suggested that Egyptian science and culture had been far more
advanced and sophisticated than modern scholars had appreciated.
However, as West put it, this evidence had been set out in ‘abstruse,
complex and uncompromising language ... Few readers seem comfortable
with raw Schwaller. It’s a bit like trying to wade directly into high energy
physics without extensive prior training.’
Schwaller’s principal publications, both originally in French, were the
massive three-volume Temple de l’Homme, which focused on Luxor, and
the more general Roi de la théocratie Pharaonique. In this latter work,
subsequently translated into English as Sacred Science, Schwaller made a
passing reference to the tremendous floods and rains which devastated
Egypt in the eleventh millennium BC. Almost as an afterthought, he
added:

A great civilization must have preceded the vast movements of water that passed
over Egypt, which leads us to assume that the Sphinx already existed, sculptured
in the rock of the west cliff at Giza—that Sphinx whose leonine body, except for
the head, shows indisputable signs of water erosion.’
2

1 Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt; Serpent in the Sky, p. 20.
2 Sacred Science, p. 96.

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