Page 425 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Why should the Ancient Egyptians have cultivated an almost obsessional
interest in the long-term observation of the stars, and why in particular
should they have kept records of their movements ‘over an incredible
number of years’? Such detailed observations would not have been
necessary if their only interest, as a number of scholars have seriously
suggested, had been agricultural (the need to predict the seasons, which
any country-born person can do). There must have been some other
purpose.
Moreover, how did the Ancient Egyptians get started on astronomy in
the first place? It is not an obvious hobby for a valley-dwelling landlocked
people to develop on their own initiative. Perhaps we should take more
seriously the explanation they themselves offer: that their ancestors were
taught the study of the stars by a god. We might also pay closer attention
to the many unmistakably maritime references in the Pyramid Texts.
34
And there could be important new inferences to draw from ancient
Egyptian religious art in which the gods are shown travelling in beautiful,
high-prowed, streamlined boats, built to the same advanced ocean-going
specifications as the pyramid boats at Giza and the mysterious fleet
moored in the desert sands at Abydos.
Landlocked people do not as rule become astronomers; seafaring
people do. Is it not possible that the maritime iconography of the Ancient
Egyptians, the design of their ships, and also their splendid obsession
with observing the stars, could have been part of an inheritance passed
on to their ancestors by an unidentified seafaring, navigating race, in
remote prehistory? It is really only such an archaic race, such a forgotten
maritime civilization, that could have left its fingerprints behind in the
form of maps which accurately depict the world as it looked before the
end of the last Ice Age. It is really only such a civilization, steering its
course by the stars ‘for ten thousand years’ that could have observed and
accurately timed the phenomenon of equinoctial precession with the
exactitude attested in the ancient myths. And, although hypothetical, it is
only such a civilization that could have measured the earth with sufficient
precision to have arrived at the dimensions scaled down in the Great
Pyramid.

The signature of a distant date

It was almost midnight by the time that we reached Giza. We checked into
the Siag, a hotel with an excellent pyramid view, and sat out on our
balcony as the three stars of Orion’s belt tracked slowly across the
southern heavens.
It was the disposition of these three stars, as archaeo-astronomer
Robert Bauval had recently demonstrated, that served as the celestial

34 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, for example pp. 78, 170, 171, 290.

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