Page 477 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

1 that the Great Sphinx is indeed, as we have argued in previous
chapters, an equinoctial marker for the Age of Leo, indicating a date in
our own chronology of between 10,970 BC and 8810 BC;

2 that the three principal pyramids are indeed laid out in relation to the
Nile Valley to mimic the precise dispositions of the three stars of
Orion’s Belt in relation to the course of the Milky Way in 10,450 BC.

This is a pretty effective means of ‘specifying’ the epoch of the eleventh
millennium BC by using the phenomenon of precession, which has been
rightly described as the ‘only true clock of our planet’. Confusingly,
23
however, we also know that the Great Pyramid incorporates star shafts
‘locked in’ to Orion’s Belt and Sirius at around 2450 BC. The hypothesis
24
resolves the anomaly of the missing years by supposing the star shafts to
be merely the later work of the same long-lived cult that originally laid
out the Giza ground-plan in 10,450 BC. Naturally, the hypothesis also
suggests that it was this same cult, towards the end of those 8000
missing years, that provided the initiating spark for the sudden and ‘fully
formed’ emergence of the literate historical civilization of dynastic Egypt.
What remains to be guessed at are the motives of the pyramid builders,
who were presumably the same people as the mysterious cartographers
who mapped the globe at the end of the last Ice Age in the northern
hemisphere. If so, we might also ask why these highly civilized and
technically accomplished architects and navigators were obsessed with
charting the gradual glaciation of the enigmatic southern continent of
Antarctica from the fourteenth millennium BC—when Hapgood calculates
that the source map referred to by Phillipe Buache was drawn up—down
to about the end of the fifth millennium BC?
Could they have been making a permanent cartographical record of the
slow obliteration of their homeland?
And could their overwhelming desire to transmit a message to the
future through a variety of different media—myths, maps, buildings,
calendar systems, mathematical harmonies—have been connected to the
cataclysms and earth changes that caused this loss?

An urgent mission

The possession of a conscious, articulated history is one of the faculties
that distinguishes human beings from animals. Unlike rats, say, or sheep,
or cows, or pheasants, we have a past which is separate from ourselves.
We therefore have the opportunity, as I have said, to learn from the
experiences of our predecessors.
Is it because we are perverse, or misguided, or simply stupid that we

23 By Robert Bauval, personal communication.
24 See Part VII.

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