Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology's Greatest Mystery Read Online Free PDF

speculation. But what if there are known entities that could influence the situation concerned – if only they were considered?
    Unfortunately the modern convention (and it is no more that an arbitrary adoption) that insists on a silo structure of historical analysis rejects cross-cultural investigation unless there is obvious and repeated artefact-based evidence to demonstrate a connection. As a consequence, sensible questions sometimes go unasked, let alone answered. Valuable evidence is consigned to the waste bin because standing assumptions are considered too important to be challenged. This cosy complacency explains why so many breakthroughs in academia come from people outside the discipline concerned or from mavericks within the subject area who are brave enough to challenge their more conservative peers.
    A perfect example of an outsider breaking the mould, but being ignored by the academic establishment, is the late Alexander Thom. He was a distinguished professor of engineering at Oxford University who, over 50 years of detailed surveying, discovered that the megalithic builders of the British Isles had been using a very finely defined set of standard units of measurement. This breakthrough in our understanding of the Neolithic period is central to our own research and we will return to Thom’s work in the next chapter, but suffice to say at this point his findings were almost universally rejected by mainstream archaeology.
    An example of a ‘maverick’ – whose discoveries are also important to our own investigations, is the late Livio Stecchini. As a professor of metrology (the science of measurement), he argued that the metric system of measurement, as devised by the French in the late 18th century, had been used in an almost identical form 4,500 years earlier in the land of Sumer. Despite his previously high standing in the academic community he was largely ostracized by his peers.
    Robert Bauval belongs (like ourselves) to a third category of people who are largely ignored by the establishment, namely non-academics. The definition of an academic is someone who has been trained in a given discipline and is subsequently employed by a university to teach and possibly conduct research in that subject. They are expected to work procedurally, to apply scientific testing to their logic and to comply with conventional protocol. This includes the process of peer review prior to the possible publication of new information in academic journals.
    Bauval is an engineer with a Master’s degree in marketing. This demonstrates that he knows how to process information and comply with the conventions of a postgraduate education. But to the world of academia, he is not a member and therefore is not a peer – so he cannot be reviewed and therefore his work cannot be directly published by any of the archaeological journals.
    So, if we put the ‘establishment’ view that the ancient Egyptians were not very skilled at astronomy to one side we can, for the moment, accept the evidence of the stellar-aligned pyramid shafts and the possibility of the Giza trio being a deliberate model of the stars of Orion’s Belt. The next question to ask is: where could the star-based ideas and beliefs behind the culture that built the pyramids have come from?
    We have to admit a bias in asking this question because our interest in the pyramids was initiated by a finding that would answer this question. At this stage of our researches we strongly suspected a connection between Neolithic Britain and ancient Egypt – but, assuming that we were right, we did not know whether the Egyptians influenced the Britons or vice versa. We needed to find out more about the origins of the Egyptian culture. Whilst we had a hypothesis to investigate we remained entirely open to what we might find, and open to changing our minds – as we have had to do on many occasions.
The First Time
    To gain an insight into the thinking behind the creation of structures as