The message of the Sphinx: a quest for the hidden legacy of mankind Read Online Free PDF Page A
Author: Graham Hancock; Robert Bauval
Tags: General, Social Science, Juvenile Nonfiction, History, Sociology, Body, Ancient, middle east, Anthropology, History: World, Egypt, Antiquities, Archaeology, ancient Egypt, Body & Spirit: General, spirit: thought & practice, Mind, Great Pyramid (Egypt), Great Pyramid (Egypt) - Miscellanea, Egypt - Antiquities - Miscellanea, Great Sphinx (Egypt) - Miscellanea, Great Sphinx (Egypt), spirit: mysticism & self-awareness, Miscellanea
much more complex and significant than has hitherto been recognized.
Meanwhile, standing in front of the ‘solar boat’ excavated from beside the south face of the Great Pyramid in 1954 it is hard not to note the marks of wear and tear on the keel and gangplank and the numerous other clear signs that this elegant cedarwood vessel, with its high curving prow and stern, was sailed many times on water. [79]
If it was purely symbolic, why was it used?
And why was it necessary to have such an elaborate and technically accomplished [80] craft for symbolic purposes? Wouldn’t a symbolic vessel—such as the brick boats and boat ‘graves’ found at other Pyramids—have done just as well?
The Pyramids
The dominant features of the Giza necropolis are, of course, its three great Pyramids—those conventionally attributed to Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure. In a sense they are what the entire, vast enterprise proclaims itself to be all about, what the causeways lead towards, what the ‘solar boats’ are buried beside. Sprawling diagonally across the meridian axis of the site, it is they, above all else, that the geometrical ‘Horizon of Giza’ appears to have been designed to circumscribe. Nothing about them is accidental: their original constructed heights, their angles of slope, the measurement of their perimeters, even the pattern in which they are carefully laid out on the ground—all of these things are purposive and laden with meaning.
Because we have described the Pyramids in such detail in other publications [81] —where we have also looked in depth into many of their technical and engineering puzzles—we will not trouble the reader with superfluous details here. Some basic statistics and a few points of analysis are, however, unavoidable at this stage.
The Great Pyramid was originally 481.3949 feet in height (now reduced to just a little over 450 feet) and its four sides each measure some 755 feet in length at the base. The second Pyramid was originally slightly lower—with a designed height of 471 feet—and has sides measuring just under 708 feet in length. The third Pyramid stands some 215 feet tall and has a side length at the base of 356 feet.
When they were built the second Pyramid and the Great Pyramid were both entirely covered in limestone facing blocks, several courses of which still adhere to the upper levels of the former. The Great Pyramid, by contrast, is today almost completely bereft of its casing. We know from historical accounts, however, that it was once clad from bottom to top with smoothly-polished Tura limestone which was shaken loose by a powerful earthquake that devastated the Cairo area in AD 1301. The newly exposed core masonry was then used for some years as a crude local quarry to rebuild the shattered mosques and palaces of Cairo.
All the Arab commentators prior to the fourteenth century tell us that the Great Pyramid’s casing was a marvel of architecture that caused the edifice to glow brilliantly under the Egyptian sun. It consisted of an estimated 22 acres of 8-foot-thick blocks, each weighing in the region of 16 tons, ‘so subtly jointed that one would have said that it was a single slab from top to bottom’. [82] A few surviving sections can still be seen today at the base of the monument. When they were studied in 1881 by Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie, he noted with astonishment that ‘the mean thickness of the joints is 0.020 of an inch; and, therefore, the mean variation of the cutting of the stone from a straight line and from a true square is but 0.01 of an inch on a length of 75 inches up the face, an amount of accuracy equal to the most modern opticians’ straight-edges of such a length.’
Another detail that Petrie found very difficult to explain was that the blocks had been carefully and precisely cemented together: ‘To merely place such stones in exact contact at the sides would be careful work, but to do so with cement in the joint seems almost impossible ...’
Meanwhile, standing in front of the ‘solar boat’ excavated from beside the south face of the Great Pyramid in 1954 it is hard not to note the marks of wear and tear on the keel and gangplank and the numerous other clear signs that this elegant cedarwood vessel, with its high curving prow and stern, was sailed many times on water. [79]
If it was purely symbolic, why was it used?
And why was it necessary to have such an elaborate and technically accomplished [80] craft for symbolic purposes? Wouldn’t a symbolic vessel—such as the brick boats and boat ‘graves’ found at other Pyramids—have done just as well?
The Pyramids
The dominant features of the Giza necropolis are, of course, its three great Pyramids—those conventionally attributed to Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure. In a sense they are what the entire, vast enterprise proclaims itself to be all about, what the causeways lead towards, what the ‘solar boats’ are buried beside. Sprawling diagonally across the meridian axis of the site, it is they, above all else, that the geometrical ‘Horizon of Giza’ appears to have been designed to circumscribe. Nothing about them is accidental: their original constructed heights, their angles of slope, the measurement of their perimeters, even the pattern in which they are carefully laid out on the ground—all of these things are purposive and laden with meaning.
Because we have described the Pyramids in such detail in other publications [81] —where we have also looked in depth into many of their technical and engineering puzzles—we will not trouble the reader with superfluous details here. Some basic statistics and a few points of analysis are, however, unavoidable at this stage.
The Great Pyramid was originally 481.3949 feet in height (now reduced to just a little over 450 feet) and its four sides each measure some 755 feet in length at the base. The second Pyramid was originally slightly lower—with a designed height of 471 feet—and has sides measuring just under 708 feet in length. The third Pyramid stands some 215 feet tall and has a side length at the base of 356 feet.
When they were built the second Pyramid and the Great Pyramid were both entirely covered in limestone facing blocks, several courses of which still adhere to the upper levels of the former. The Great Pyramid, by contrast, is today almost completely bereft of its casing. We know from historical accounts, however, that it was once clad from bottom to top with smoothly-polished Tura limestone which was shaken loose by a powerful earthquake that devastated the Cairo area in AD 1301. The newly exposed core masonry was then used for some years as a crude local quarry to rebuild the shattered mosques and palaces of Cairo.
All the Arab commentators prior to the fourteenth century tell us that the Great Pyramid’s casing was a marvel of architecture that caused the edifice to glow brilliantly under the Egyptian sun. It consisted of an estimated 22 acres of 8-foot-thick blocks, each weighing in the region of 16 tons, ‘so subtly jointed that one would have said that it was a single slab from top to bottom’. [82] A few surviving sections can still be seen today at the base of the monument. When they were studied in 1881 by Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie, he noted with astonishment that ‘the mean thickness of the joints is 0.020 of an inch; and, therefore, the mean variation of the cutting of the stone from a straight line and from a true square is but 0.01 of an inch on a length of 75 inches up the face, an amount of accuracy equal to the most modern opticians’ straight-edges of such a length.’
Another detail that Petrie found very difficult to explain was that the blocks had been carefully and precisely cemented together: ‘To merely place such stones in exact contact at the sides would be careful work, but to do so with cement in the joint seems almost impossible ...’