From Atlantis to the Sphinx Read Online Free PDF Page A

is not to collapse under its own weight, it will have to be built of massive blocks like those used in the Pyramid.
    The alternative is some kind of lifting gear, rather like a modern crane, but built, of course, of wood. But here the same problem applies. To raise blocks weighing several tons to a height of nearly five hundred feet would require a crane built of several of those gigantic trees found in American forests. Such trees do not exist in Egypt, or even in Europe.
    There is another possibility. Assuming you have plenty of time, you might use smaller lifting gear, and move it from step to step of the Pyramid, raising each block a step at a time. In fact, according to Herodotus, this was the method used:
    The pyramid was built in steps, battlement-wise, as it is called, or, according to others, altar-wise. After laying the stones for the base, they raised the remaining stones to their places by machines formed of short wooden planks. The first machines raised them from the ground to the top of the first step. On this there was another machine, which received the stone upon its arrival, and conveyed it to the second step, whence a third machine advanced it still higher.
    The notion of raising six-ton blocks with planks sounds difficult enough, but the idea of manoeuvring such blocks on ledges sometimes only six inches wide sounds impossible. Moreover, to move more than two and a half million blocks in this way, at the rate of 25 a day, would take about 150 years. And if the workmen were only working part-time, during the season when they did not have to tend their farms, it could be twice that period.
    In fact, in the 1980s, the Japanese had tried to build a smaller replica of the Great Pyramid as a showpiece. Even with modern equipment, the problem defeated them, and it was abandoned.
    Reluctantly, I suggest, you would tell the Pharaoh to find another construction engineer, and would go off to seek some simpler project, like building the Empire State Building or Brooklyn Bridge.
    And what had led the Hancocks to embark on this risky project? The answer dates back eleven years, when Graham Hancock was an economics journalist in Ethiopia, and went to see the film Raiders of the Lost Ark . It aroused his curiosity about the Ark of the Covenant, the sacred wooden chest lined with gold that the Hebrews carried into battle, and which had vanished from history many centuries before Christ. He was intrigued to learn that Ethiopian Christians believed that the Ark of the Covenant was preserved in a chapel in the centre of the town of Axum, near the Red Sea. Scholars and archaeologists—inevitably—dismissed the claim as absurd. Hancock felt that this attitude was based on arrogance and stupidity, and set out to prove them wrong.
    What he had to establish was how the Ark of Axum had got from Jerusalem—twelve hundred miles to the north—down to Ethiopia, and what it was doing there.
    Study of biblical sources convinced him that the Ark had vanished from Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem in the reign of the bloody and brutal king Manasseh, who occupied the throne from 687 BC to 642 BC; he had rejected Judaism, and defiled the Temple by installing a ‘graven image’ of Baal. There seemed every reason to believe that the priests had been ordered to remove the Ark by Manasseh. But why had it been taken as far as Ethiopia?
    A vital clue was handed to him by a Jewish scholar, who mentioned that there had once been a Jewish temple on the island of Elephantine, in the upper Nile. This was unusual; the Jews had believed that foreign soil was unclean. A visit to Elephantine, and the discovery that its temple—now destroyed—had been of exactly the same dimensions as Solomon’s Temple, convinced Hancock that this had been the first major staging post on the journey of the Ark. The Jews had been forced to move on because of a clash with their Egyptian neighbours, who worshipped a ram-headed deity in a nearby temple, and objected to