Page 433 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

unadorned style of architecture as the better-known Valley Temple. Here,
at any rate, were the same enormous blocks, weighing 200 tons or more
each. And here too was the same intangible atmosphere of vast
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antiquity and awakening intelligence, as though some epiphany might be
at hand. Even in its present, much despoiled state, this anonymous
structure, which Egyptologists had called a Mortuary Temple, was still a
place of power that seemed to draw its energy from an epoch far in the
past.
I looked up at the huge mass of the Second Pyramid’s eastern face just
behind us in the pearl-grey dawn light. Again, as John West had pointed
out, there was much to suggest that it might have been built in two
different stages. The lower courses, up to a height of perhaps thirty feet,
consisted largely of cyclopean limestone megaliths like those in the
temples. Above this height, however, the remainder of the pyramid’s
gigantic core had been formed out of much smaller blocks weighing
around two to three tons each (like the majority of the blocks in the Great
Pyramid).
Had there been a time when a twelve-acre, thirty-foot-high megalithic
platform had stood here on the ‘hill of Giza’, west of the Sphinx,
surrounded only by nameless square and rectangular structures such as
the Valley and Mortuary Temples? In other words, was it possible that the
Second Pyramid’s lower courses might have been built first, before the
other pyramids—perhaps long before, in a much earlier age?

The cult

That question was still on my mind when Robert Bauval arrived. After
exchanging a few chilly pleasantries about the weather—a cold desert
wind was blowing across the plateau—I asked him, ‘How do you account
for the 8000-year gap in your correlations?’
‘Gap?’
‘Yes; shafts that seem to have been aligned in 2450 BC and a site-plan
that maps star positions in 10,450 BC.’
‘Actually, I see two explanations that both make some kind of sense,’
said Bauval, ‘and I think the answer has to be one or the other of these ...
Either the pyramids were designed as a sort of “star-clock” to mark two
particular epochs, 2450 and 10,450 BC, in which case we actually can’t
say when they were built. Or they were built up over ...’
‘Hang on with that first point,’ I interrupted. ‘How do you mean “star-
clock”? How do you mean we can’t say when they were built?’
‘Well, let’s assume for a moment that the pyramid builders knew

The Mortuary Temple was excavated by von Sieglin in 1910 and was found to consist
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of blocks of varying sizes weighing ‘between 100 and 300 tons’. Blue Guide: Egypt, p.
431.

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