Page 428 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

The Orion Mystery

The roots of Bauval’s discoveries at Giza go back to the 1960s when the
Egyptologist and architect Dr. Alexander Badawy and the American
astronomer Virginia Trimble demonstrated that the southern shaft of the
King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid was targeted like a gun-barrel on
the Belt of Orion during the Pyramid Age—around 2600 to 2400 BC.
2
Bauval decided to test the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber,
which Badawy and Trimble had not investigated, and established that it
had been sighted on the star Sirius during the Pyramid Age. The evidence
that proved this was provided by the German engineer Rudolf
Gantenbrink as a result of measurements taken by his robot Upuaut in
March 1993. This was the robot that had made the startling discovery of
a closed portcullis door blocking the shaft at a distance of about 200 feet
from the Queen’s Chamber. Equipped with a high-tech on-board
clinometer, the little machine had also provided the first-ever completely
accurate reading of the shaft’s angle of inclination: 39° 30’.
3
As Bauval explains:

I did the calculations and these established that the shaft had been targeted on
the meridian transit of Sirius around the epoch 2400 BC. There couldn’t be any
doubt about it at all. I also recalculated the Orion’s Belt alignment worked out by
Badawy and Trimble with new data that Gantenbrink gave me on the inclination of
the southern shaft of the King’s Chamber. He’d measured that at 45 degrees
exactly, whereas Badawy and Trimble had worked with Flinders Petrie’s slightly
less accurate measurement of 44° 30’. The new data enabled me to refine
Badawy’s and Trimble’s date for the alignment. What I found was that the shaft
had been precisely targeted on Al Nitak, the lowest of the three belt stars, which
crossed the meridian at altitude 45 degrees around the year 2475 BC.
4
Up to this point Bauval’s conclusions had been well within the
chronological bounds set by orthodox Egyptologists, who normally dated
the construction of the Great Pyramid to around 2520 BC. If anything, the
5
alignments the archaeo-astronomer had come up with suggested that the
shafts had been built a little later, rather than earlier, than conventional
wisdom allowed.
As the reader is aware, however, Bauval had also made another
discovery of an altogether more unsettling nature. Once again it involved
the stars of Orion’s Belt:

They’re slanted along a diagonal in a south-westerly direction relative to the axis
of the Milky Way and the pyramids are slanted along a diagonal in a southwesterly
direction relative to the axis of the Nile. If you look carefully on a clear night you’ll
also see that the smallest of the three stars, the one at the top which the Arabs
call Mintaka, is slightly offset to the east of the principal diagonal formed by the

2 Virginia Trimble, cited in The Orion Mystery, p. 241.
Ibid., p. 172.
3
4 Personal communications/interviews, 1993-4.
5 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.

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